Ah! what a motley multitude,
Magnanimous and mean!"

FOOTNOTES:

[A] _Saul._ A Drama, in Three Parts. Montreal: John Lovell. 1850.

_Count Fillippo; or The Unequal Marriage._ By the Author of "Saul."
Montreal: Printed for the Author. 1860.

_Jephthah's Daughter._ By Charles Heavysege, Author of "Saul." Montreal:
Dawson Brothers. 1865.

NEEDLE AND GARDEN.

THE STORY OF A SEAMSTRESS WHO LAID DOWN HER NEEDLE AND BECAME A
STRAWBERRY-GIRL.

WRITTEN BY HERSELF.

CHAPTER X.

CONCLUSION.

Although two thirds of our little patrimony had thus been devoted to the
cultivation of fruit, yet the other third was far from being suffered to
remain unproductive. We thoroughly understood the art of raising all the
household vegetables, as we had been brought up to assist our father at
intervals throughout the season. Then none of us were indifferent to
flowers. There were little clumps and borders of them in numerous
places. Nowhere did the crocus come gayly up into the soft atmosphere of
early spring in advance of ours. The violets perfumed the air for us
with the same rich profusion as in the carefully tended parterre of the
wealthiest citizen. There were rows of flowering almonds, which were
sought after by the bees as diligently as if holding up their delicate
heads in the most patrician garden; and they flashed as gorgeously in
the sun. The myrtle displayed its blue flowers in abundance, and the
lilacs unfolded their paler clusters in a dozen places. Over a huge
cedar in the fence-corner there clambered up a magnificent wistaria,
whose great blue flowers, covering the entire tree, became a monument of
floral beauty so striking, that the stranger, passing by the spot, would
pause to wonder and admire. In the care of these flowers all of us
united with a common fondness for the beautiful as well as the useful.
It secured to us, from the advent of the earliest crocus to the
departure of the last lingering rose that dropped its reluctant flowers
only when the premonitory blasts of autumn swept across the garden, all
that innocent enjoyment which comes of admiration for these bright
creations of the Divine hand.

These little incidental recompenses of the most perfect domestic harmony
were realized in everything we undertook. That harmony was the animating
as well as sustaining power of my horticultural enterprise. Had there
been wrangling, opposition, or ridicule, it is probable that I should
never have v