r
faithfully doing his best, as he often is, I really don't know. Not that
all the ill words he gets have much effect on him--he comes again just
as usual, whatever we say of or to him. I suppose his feelings have long
ago been frozen up, or surely before this he would have taken
offence--well for us that he has not done so!

But when the spring did come at last this year, it would be impossible
for me to tell you how Griselda enjoyed it. It was like new life to her
as well as to the plants, and flowers, and birds, and insects. Hitherto,
you see, she had been able to see very little of the outside of her
aunt's house; and charming as the inside was, the outside, I must say,
was still "charminger." There seemed no end to the little up-and-down
paths and alleys, leading to rustic seats and quaint arbours; no limits
to the little pine-wood, down into which led the dearest little
zig-zaggy path you ever saw, all bordered with snow-drops and primroses
and violets, and later on with periwinkles, and wood anemones, and those
bright, starry, white flowers, whose name no two people agree about.

This wood-path was the place, I think, which Griselda loved the best.
The bowling-green was certainly very delightful, and so was the terrace
where the famous roses grew; but lovely as the roses were (I am speaking
just now, of course, of later on in the summer, when they were all in
bloom), Griselda could not enjoy them as much as the wild-flowers, for
she was forbidden to gather or touch them, except with her funny round
nose!

"You may _scent_ them, my dear," said Miss Grizzel, who was of opinion
that smell was not a pretty word; "but I cannot allow anything more."

And Griselda did "scent" them, I assure you. She burrowed her whole rosy
face in the big ones; but gently, for she did not want to spoil them,
both for her aunt's sake, and because, too, she had a greater regard for
flowers now that she knew the secret of how they were painted, and what
a great deal of trouble the butterflies take about them.

But after a while one grows tired of "scenting" roses; and even the
trying to walk straight across the bowling-green with her eyes shut,
from the arbour at one side to the arbour exactly like it at the other,
grew stupid, though no doubt it would have been capital fun with a
companion to applaud or criticize.

So the wood-path became Griselda's favourite haunt. As the summer grew
on, she began to long more than ever for a compa