resistible good-nature of Cicely, a
smiling, rosy, sunny-looking creature, whose only vocation in this world
seemed to be the trying to make everybody as happy as herself.

Mrs. Deborah (with such a humanising taste, she could not, in spite of
her cantankerous temper, be all bad) loved flowers: and Cicely, a
rover of the woods and fields from early childhood, and no despicable
practical gardener, took care to keep her beaupots constantly supplied
from the first snowdrop to the last china rose. Nothing was too large
for Cicely's good-will, nothing too small. Huge chimney jars of lilacs,
laburnums, horse-chestnuts, peonies, and the golden and gorgeous double
furze; china jugs filled with magnificent double stocks, and rich
wallflowers,* with their bitter-sweet odour, like the taste of orange
marmalade, pinks, sweet-peas, and mignonette, from her own little
garden, or woodland posies that might beseem the hand of the faerie
queen, composed of those gems of flowers, the scarlet pimpernel, and the
blue anagallis, the rosy star of the wild geranium, with its aromatic
crimson-tipped leaves, the snowy star of the white ochil, and that third
starry flower the yellow loose-strife, the milk vetch, purple, or pink,
or cream coloured, backed by moss-like leaves and lilac blossoms of the
lousewort, and overhung by the fragrant bells and cool green leaves of
the lily of the valley.

* Few flowers, (and almost all look best when arranged each
sort in its separate vase,)--few look so well together as
the four sorts of double wallflowers. The common dark, (the
old bloody warrior)--I have a love for those graphic names--
words which paint the common dark, the common yellow, the
newer and more intensely coloured dark, and that new gold
colour still so rare, which is in tint, form, growth,
hardiness, and profusion, one of the most valuable
acquisitions to the flower garden. When placed together in
ajar, the brighter blossoms seem to stand out from those of
deeper hue, with exactly the sort of relief, the harmonious
combination of light and shade, that one sometimes sees in
the rich gilt carving of an old flower-wreathed picture-
frame, or, better still, it might seem a pot of flowers
chased in gold, by Benvenuto Cellini, in which the
workmanship outvalued the metal. Many beaupots are gayer,
many sweeter, but this is the richest, both for scent and
c