and bring them in directly.'

Berenger, at her bidding, hurried out of the room into the hall,
and thence down a flight of steps leading into a square walled
garden, with a couple of stone male and female marine divinities
accommodating their fishy extremities as best they might on the
corners of the wall. The square contained a bowling-green of
exquisitely-kept turf, that looked as if cut out of green velvet,
and was edged on its four sides by a raised broad-paved walk, with
a trimming of flower-beds, where the earliest blossoms were showing
themselves. In the centre of each side another paved path
intersected the green lawn, and the meeting of these two diameters
was at a circular stone basin, presided over by another merman,
blowing a conch on the top of a pile of rocks. On the gravelled
margin stood two distressed little damsels of seven and six years
old, remonstrating with all their might against the proceedings of
a roguish-looking boy of fourteen of fifteen, who had perched their
junior--a fat, fair, kitten-like element of mischief, aged about
five--_en croupe_ on the merman, and was about, according to her
delighted request, to make her a bower of water, by extracting the
plug and setting the fountain to play; but as the fountain had been
still all the winter, the plug was hard of extraction, especially
to a young gentleman who stood insecurely, with his feet wide apart
upon pointed and slippery point of rock-work; and Berenger had time
to hurry up, exclaiming, 'Giddy pate! Dolly would Berenger drenched
to the skin.'

'And she has on her best blue, made out of mother's French
farthingale,' cried the discreet Annora.