of ivy ran broadening to the outer ground. The royal Arms were said to
have surmounted the great iron gateway; but they had vanished, either
with the family, or at the indications of an approaching rust. Rust
defiled its bars; but, when you looked through them, the splendour of an
unrivalled garden gave vivid signs of youth, and of the taste of an
orderly, laborious, and cunning hand.

The garden was under Mrs. Fleming's charge. The joy of her love for it
was written on its lustrous beds, as poets write. She had the poetic
passion for flowers. Perhaps her taste may now seem questionable. She
cherished the old-fashioned delight in tulips; the house was reached on a
gravel-path between rows of tulips, rich with one natural blush, or
freaked by art. She liked a bulk of colour; and when the dahlia dawned
upon our gardens, she gave her heart to dahlias. By good desert, the
fervent woman gained a prize at a flower-show for one of her dahlias, and
`Dahlia' was the name uttered at the christening of her eldest daughter,
at which all Wrexby parish laughed as long as the joke could last. There
was laughter also when Mrs. Fleming's second daughter received the name
of 'Rhoda;' but it did not endure for so long a space, as it was known
that she had taken more to the solitary and reflective reading of her
Bible, and to thoughts upon flowers eternal. Country people are not
inclined to tolerate the display of a passion for anything. They find it
as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the midst of larger
congregations, what we call genius. For some years, Mrs. Fleming's
proceedings were simply a theme for gossips, and her vanity was openly
pardoned, until that delusively prosperous appearance which her labour
lent to the house, was worn through by the enforced confession of there
being poverty in the household. The ragged elbow was then projected in
the face of Wrexby in a manner to preclude it from a sober appreciation
of the fairness of the face.