her throne might be glad to smell at a nosegay of the flowers. A beau-
pot (as we called it) of pinks and roses freshly gathered was placed
every morning that they were in bloom on my lady's own particular table.
For lasting vegetable odours she preferred lavender and sweet-woodroof to
any extract whatever. Lavender reminded her of old customs, she said,
and of homely cottage-gardens, and many a cottager made his offering to
her of a bundle of lavender. Sweet woodroof, again, grew in wild,
woodland places where the soil was fine and the air delicate: the poor
children used to go and gather it for her up in the woods on the higher
lands; and for this service she always rewarded them with bright new
pennies, of which my lord, her son, used to send her down a bagful fresh
from the Mint in London every February.

Attar of roses, again, she disliked. She said it reminded her of the
city and of merchants' wives, over-rich, over-heavy in its perfume. And
lilies-of-the-valley somehow fell under the same condemnation. They were
most graceful and elegant to look at (my lady was quite candid about
this), flower, leaf, colour--everything was refined about them but the
smell. That was too strong. But the great hereditary faculty on which
my lady piqued herself, and with reason, for I never met with any person
who possessed it, was the power she had of perceiving the delicious odour
arising from a bed of strawberries in the late autumn, when the leaves
were all fading and dying. "Bacon's Essays" was one of the few books
that lay about in my lady's room; and if you took it up and opened it
carelessly, it was sure to fall apart at his "Essay on Gardens."
"Listen," her ladyship would say, "to what that great philosopher and
statesman says. 'Next to that,'--he is speaking of violets, my dear,--'is
the musk-rose,'--of which you remember the great bush, at the corner of
the south wall just by the Blue Drawing-room windows; that is the old
musk-rose, Shakespeare's musk-rose, which is dying out through the