en. It means (and it is no small merit that it has no exact
synonym) anything done with a profound and plodding attention, an action
which engrosses all the powers of mind and body.

Ah! here is the hedge along which the periwinkle wreathes and twines so
profusely, with its evergreen leaves shining like the myrtle, and its
starry blue flowers. It is seldom found wild in this part of England;
but, when we do meet with it, it is so abundant and so welcome,--the
very robin-redbreast of flowers, a winter friend. Unless in those
unfrequent frosts which destroy all vegetation, it blossoms from
September to June, surviving the last lingering crane's-bill,
forerunning the earliest primrose, hardier even than the mountain
daisy,--peeping out from beneath the snow, looking at itself in the ice,
smiling through the tempests of life, and yet welcoming and enjoying the
sunbeams. Oh, to be like that flower!

The little spring that has been bubbling under the hedge all along
the hillside, begins, now that we have mounted the eminence and are
imperceptibly descending, to deviate into a capricious variety of clear
deep pools and channels, so narrow and so choked with weeds, that a
child might overstep them. The hedge has also changed its character. It
is no longer the close compact vegetable wall of hawthorn, and maple,
and brier-roses, intertwined with bramble and woodbine, and crowned with
large elms or thickly-set saplings. No! the pretty meadow which rises
high above us, backed and almost surrounded by a tall coppice, needs
no defence on our side but its own steep bank, garnished with tufts of
broom, with pollard oaks wreathed with ivy, and here and there with long
patches of hazel overhanging the water. 'Ah, there are still nuts on
that bough!' and in an instant my dear companion, active and eager and
delighted as a boy, has hooked down with his walking-stick one of the
lissome hazel stalks, and cleared it of its tawny clusters, and in
another moment he has mounted the bank, and is in the midst of the
nuttery, now transferring the spoil from the lower branches into that
vast variety of pockets which gentlemen carry about them, now bending
the tall tops into the lane, holding them down by main force, so that
I might reach them and enjoy the pleasure of collecting some of the
plunder myself. A very great pleasure he knew it would be. I doffed my
shawl, tucked up my flounces, turned my straw bonnet into a basket, and
began gathering