fuchsias, and geraniums,--and roses that grew in every possible
way that roses have ever grown, or can ever grow. The farmhouse
fronted fully on this garden, and a magnificent "Glory" rose
covered it from its deep black oaken porch to its highest gable,
wreathing it with hundreds of pale golden balls of perfume. A real
"old" rose it was, without any doubt of its own intrinsic worth
and sweetness,--a rose before which the most highly trained
hybrids might hang their heads for shame or wither away with envy,
for the air around it was wholly perfumed with its honey-scented
nectar, distilled from peaceful years upon years of sunbeams and
stainless dew. The girl, still carrying her pet dove, walked
slowly along the narrow gravelled paths that encircled the flower-
beds and box-borders, till, reaching a low green door at the
further end of the garden, she opened it and passed through into a
newly mown field, where several lads and men were about busily
employed in raking together the last swaths of a full crop of hay
and adding them to the last waggon which stood in the centre of
the ground, horseless, and piled to an almost toppling height. One
young fellow, with a crimson silk tie knotted about his open
shirt-collar, stood on top of the lofty fragrant load, fork in
hand, tossing the additional heaps together as they were thrown up
to him. The afternoon sun blazed burningly down on his uncovered
head and bare brown arms, and as he shook and turned the hay with
untiring energy, his movements were full of the easy grace and
picturesqueness which are often the unconscious endowment of those
whose labour keeps them daily in the fresh air. Occasional bursts
of laughter and scraps of rough song came from the others at work,
and there was only one absolutely quiet figure among them, that of
an old man sitting on an upturned barrel which had been but
recently emptied of its home-brewed beer, meditatively smoking a