re while Agnetta was so vexed with her.
Even Uncle Joshua, who had always helped her at need, had nothing to
suggest now, and did not even seem to think it of much importance. He
dropped in to see Mrs White on the evening before May Day, and with her
usual faith in him Lilac at once began to place her difficulty before
him. But for once he was not ready to listen, and she was obliged to
wait impatiently while he carried on a long conversation with her
mother. They had a great deal to talk of, and it was most uninteresting
to Lilac, for it was all about things of the past in which she had had
no share. She might have liked it at another time, but just now she was
full of the present, and she became more and more impatient as Uncle
Joshua went on. He had to call back the first celebration of May Day
which he "minded", and the smallest event connected with it; and when he
had done Mrs White took up the tale, dwelling specially on Jem's
musical talent, and how he had been the very soul of the drum-and-fife
band.

"They're all at sixes and sevens now, to my thinking," she said. "Jem,
he kep' 'em together and made 'em do their best."

"Aye, that's where it is," said the cobbler with an approving nod;
"that's what we've all on us got to do."

His eye rested as he spoke on Lilac's eager face, and seizing the
opportunity of a pause she rushed in with what she had so much on her
mind:

"Oh, Uncle Joshua! to-morrow's the day, and I can't get no white lilac
for Miss Ellen to make my garland with. What shall I do?"

But Joshua was in a moralising mood, and though Lilac's question gave
him another subject to discourse on, he was more bent on hearing himself
talk than in getting over her difficulty. He raised one finger and
began to speak slowly, and when Mrs White saw that, she paused with the
kettle in her hand and stood quite still to listen. Joshua was going to
say something "good."

"It don't matter a bit," he said, "what you make your garland of.
Flowers is all perishin' things and they'll be dead next day, and wear
what you will, they won't make you into a real Queen. But there's
things as will always make folks bow down when they see 'em, May Day or
no May Day, and them's the things you ought to seek for, early and late
till you find 'em. You take a lot of pains to get flowers to deck your
outsides, but you don't care much for the plants I'm thinking of; you
leave 'em to chance, and so sometimes they're choke