ld bob their heads to catch a whiff of the scent as they
passed, or to let the cool fragrant flowers brush their foreheads. On
this point Madame, our French governess, remonstrated in vain. We took
turns for the side next to the lilac, and sniffed away as long as there
was anything to smell. Even when the delicate colour began to turn
brown, and the fragrance vanished, we were loth to believe that the
blossoms were fading.

"I think I have got a cold in my head," said Matilda, who had plunged
her nose into the cluster one day in vain.

"You have a cough, ma foi! Mademoiselle Buller," replied Madame, who
seemed to labour under the idea that Matilda rather enjoyed this
privilege. But I had tried the lilac-bush myself with no better
success.

"I think," I whispered to Eleanor, in English, "that we have smelt it
all up."

"Parlez-vous francais, mesdemoiselles!" cried Madame, and we filed out
into the dusty street, at the corner of which sat another of our visible
tokens of the coming of the season of flowers; a dirty, shrivelled old
Irishwoman, full of benedictions and beggary, who, all through the
summer, sold "posies" to the passers-by. We school-girls were good
customers to her. We were all more or less sentimental, more or less
homesick, and had more or less of that susceptibility to the influence
of scents which may, some day, be the basis of a new school of medicine.
One girl had cultivated pinks and _Roses de Meaux_ in her own garden "at
home," and Bridget was soon wise enough to discover that a nosegay
composed of these materials was an irresistible temptation to that
particular customer. Another had a craving for the sight and smell of
southernwood (or "old man," as Eleanor called it), and preferred it in
combination with bachelor's buttons.

"There was an old woman 'at home' whom we used to go to tea with when we
were children--my brother and I," she said; "there were such big bunches
of southernwood by her cottage. And bachelor's buttons all round the
garden."

The brother was dead, I knew, and there were two flattened "buttons" and
a bit of withered "old man" gummed into her Bible. "Picked the last day
we were out together. Before he was taken ill with scarlet fever," she
told me. She had the boy's portrait in a standing frame, and, little
space as we had in our bedrooms, the other girls piled their brushes and
ribbon-boxes on one side of the looking-glass as best they could, and
left the rest of the dre