uld tell
why, but yet we instinctively felt, that the moss-grown thatch, the
mouldering paling, the hoary apple trees, in a word, the evidences of
decay visible around the place, were but types of the fading fortunes of
the inmates.

* I know nothing so pretty as the manner in which creeping
plants interwreath themselves one with another. We have at
this moment a wall quite covered with honeysuckles,
fuchsias, roses, clematis, passion flowers, myrtles,
scobsea, acrima carpis, lotus spermus, and maurandia
Barclayana, in which two long sprays of the last-mentioned
climbers have jutted out from the wall, and entwined
themselves together, like the handle of an antique basket.
The rich profusion of leaves, those of the lotus spermus,
comparatively rounded and dim, soft in texture and colour,
with a darker patch in the middle, like the leaf of the old
gum geranium; those of the maurandia, so bright, and
shining, and sharply outlined--the stalks equally graceful
in their varied green, and the roseate bells of the one
contrasting and harmonising so finely with the rich violet
flowers of the other, might really form a study for a
painter. I never saw anything more graceful in quaint and
cunning art than this bit of simple nature. But nature often
takes a fancy to outvie her skilful and ambitious
handmaiden, and is always certain to succeed in the
competition.

And such was really the case. The widow King had known better days. Her
husband had been the head keeper, her only son head gardener, of
the lord of the manor; but both were dead; and she, with an orphan
grandchild, a thoughtful boy of eight or nine years old, now gained a
scanty subsistence from the produce of their little dairy, their few
poultry, their honey, (have I not said that a row of bee-hives held
their station on the sunny side of the garden?). and the fruit and
flowers which little Tom and the old donkey carried in their season to
Belford every market-day.

Besides these their accustomed sources of income, Mrs. King and Tom
neglected no means of earning an honest penny. They stripped the downy
spikes of the bulrushes to stuff cushions and pillows, and wove the
rushes themselves into mats. Poor Tom was as handy as a girl; and in the
long winter evenings he would phut the straw hats in which he went to
Belford market, and knit the stockings, which, kept