"where is our little rose?"

"It was too much trouble, Katy," said she, quietly; "I have put it
into the garden."

"But isn't it going to stand in our window any more?"

"No, dear, I am tired of it."

"Oh, do bring it back! I will take the whole care of it," said I,
beginning to cry.

"Katy," said my aunt, taking me into her lap, and looking steadily,
but kindly, into my face, "listen to me. I do not wish to have that
rose in my room any more; and if you love me, you will never mention
it again."

Something in her manner prevented my uttering a word more in behalf of
the poor little exile. As soon as I was dressed, I ran down into the
garden to visit it. It looked very lonely, I thought; I could hardly
bear to leave it. The day following, it disappeared from the garden,
and old Nanny, the housemaid, told me that my aunt had given it
away. I never saw it again.

Thus ended my personal acquaintance with the little Button-Rose. But
that first strong impression on my fancy was indelible. The flower
still lived in my memory, surrounded by associations which gave it a
mystic charm. By degrees I ceased to miss it from the window; but that
strange garden scene grew more and more vivid, and became a cabinet
picture in one of the little inner chambers of memory, where I often
pondered it with a delicious sense of mystery. The rose and
humming-bird seemed to me the chief actors in the magic pantomime, and
they were some way connected with my dear Aunt Linny and the
black-eyed young man; but what it all meant was the great puzzle of my
busy little brain. It has sometimes been a matter of curious
speculation to me, what share that diminutive flower had in the
development of my mind and character. With it, so it seems to me,
began the first dawn of a conscious inner life. I can still recollect
with wonderful distinctness what I have thought and felt since that
date, while all the preceding years are vague and shadowy as an
ill-remembered dream. From them I can only conjure up, as it were, my
outward form,--a happy animal existence, with which scarce a feeling
of self is connected; but from the time when I bore a part in this
little fragment of a romance the current of identity flows on
unbroken. From that light waking touch, perchance, the whole
subsequent development took form and tone.--But, gentle reader, your
pardon! This is nothing to my story.

CHAPTER II.

Ten years had slipped away, and I was now in my sixteent