wander herself, she transplants shrubs and herbs from nook to nook. No
sooner does a green thing get safely rooted than Miss Nancy snatches it
up and sets it elsewhere. Her yard is a varying pageant of plants in
all stages of misfortune. Here is a shrub, with faded leaves, torn from
the lap of prosperity in a well-sunned corner to languish under
different conditions. There stands a hardy bush, shrinking, one might
guess, under all its bravery of new spring green, from the premonition
that Miss Nancy may move it tomorrow. Even the ladies'-delights have
their months of garish prosperity, wherein they sicken like country
maids; for no sooner do they get their little feet settled in a dark,
still corner than they are summoned out of it, to sunlight bright and
strong. Miss Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish
through long patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has
roused in her a fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and
that she hurries her plants into motion because she herself must halt?
Her father does not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no
luck with plants." And that, indeed, is true.

There is another dooryard with its infallible index finger pointing to
tell a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles
of all sorts, congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the
hands of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and
though, for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet
inwardly constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no
purpose. He is everlastingly swapping and bargaining, giving play to a
faculty which might, in its legitimate place, have worked out the
definite and tangible, but which now goes automatically clicking on
under vain conditions. The house, too, is overrun with useless
articles, presently to be exchanged for others as unavailing, and in
the farmer's pocket ticks a watch which to-morrow will replace with