Or the voice of a brook when its waters are low,
That murmurs and murmurs and murmurs away--
Was the sound of her words in their meaningless flow.

After a while, finding that Mrs. Farnham was still talking at the
children, and dealing him a sharp sentence or two over their
shoulders, for preferring the scenery to her conversation, the Judge
quietly drew in his head, and gathering up a quantity of the flowers,
arranged a pretty bouquet for each of the little girls, who received
them with shy satisfaction.

Then with more effort at arrangement, he completed a third bouquet,
and laid it on Mrs. Farnham's lap with affected diffidence, that went
directly to that very weak portion of the lady's system, which she
dignified with the name of heart.

Enoch Sharp smiled at the effect of his adroit attention, while the
lady, appeased into a state of gentle self-complacency, rewarded him
with beaming smiles and a fresh avalanche of those soft frothy words,
which she solemnly believed were conversation. From time to time she
refreshed herself with the perfume of his mountain flowers, descanted
on their beauties with sentimental warmth, and murmured snatches of
poetry over them, very soft, very sentimental, and particularly
annoying to a man filled in all the depths of his soul with an honest
love of nature.

"I wish my ward could have seen the old place before he went to
college," observed the Judge, adroitly seizing upon a pause in this
cataract of words, and making a desperate effort to change the
subject. "He will find Harvard rather dull, I fear, at first."