still in hand, his outstretched arms trembling with pleasure.

"Well, well, so here you are. It's good to see you. Tina, they have come
sooner than we expected them. Moses" (to a little negro, who appeared
from behind the currant bushes, where he had been digging), "take the
bags upstairs to the front rooms and tell your Miss Tina that they have
come sooner than we expected them."

As Moses darted off on his errand, in which he was assisted by the negro
coachman, Dr. Theophilus led us back into the garden, and placed Sally
in a low canvas chair, which he had brought from the porch to a shady
spot between a gorgeous giant of battle rose-bush and a bed of bleeding
hearts in full bloom.

"Come and sit down, my dear, come and sit down," he repeated, fussing
about her. "Tina will give you a cup of tea out here before you go to
your rooms, and Ben and I will take our juleps before supper. I've been
working in my garden, you see; there's nothing so satisfying in old age
as a taste for flowers. It's more absorbing than chess, as I tell
George--old George, I mean--and it's more soothing than children. Were
you far enough South, my dear, to see the yellow jessamine grow wild?
They tell me, too, that the Marshal Niel rose runs there up to the roofs
of the houses. With us it is a very delicate rose. I have never been
able to do anything with it,--but I have had a great success this year
with my bleeding hearts, you will notice. Ah, there's Tina! So you see,
Tina, here they are. They came sooner than we expected."

From the low white porch, under a bower of honeysuckle, Mrs. Clay
appeared, with a cup of tea and a silver basket of sponge snowballs
which she placed before Sally on a small green table; and immediately a
troop of slate-coloured pigeons fluttered from the mimosa tree and the
clipped yew at the end of the garden, and began pecking greedily in the
gravelled walk.

"I'm glad you've come, my dears," remarked the old lady in her brusque,
honest manner, "and I hope to heaven that you will be able to take
Theophilus's mind off his flowers. I declare he has grown so besotted
about them that I believe he'd sell the very clothes off his back to buy
a new variety of rose or lily. Only a week ago he took back a dozen
socks I had given him because he said he'd rather have the money to
spend in a strange kind of iris he'd just heard of."

"A most remarkable plant," observed the doctor, with enthusiasm, "the
peculiarity of which