ng_ it, Raquel, she orders accordin'!"

But the southern trees had lived, and had even, some of them, thrived a
little under the unwonted northern methods applied to them; Mrs. Thorne,
therefore, was able to rise above old Pablo's disapprovals--a feat,
indeed, which she had been obliged to perform almost daily, and with
regard to many other things than oranges, ever since her first arrival
at East Angels, seventeen years before.

This lady now seated herself on a bench under the rose-tree. She had
tied on, over her neat little widow's cap, the broad-brimmed palmetto
hat which she usually wore in the garden; this hat had fallen slightly
back, and now its broad yellow brim, standing out in a circle round her
small face, looked not unlike the dull nimbus with which the heads of
the stiff, sweet little angels in the early Italian paintings are
weighted down. The clergyman, Mr. Moore, stood beside her.

The Rev. Middleton Moore, rector of St. Philip and St. James's,
Gracias-a-Dios, was a tall gentleman, with narrow, slightly stooping
shoulders, long thin hands, a long smooth face, and thin dry brown hair
which always looked long (though it was not), because it grew from the
top of his head down to his ears in straight flat smoothness, the ends
being there cut across horizontally. His features were delicately
moulded. His long feet were slender and well-shaped. There was a
charming expression of purity and goodness in his small, mild blue eyes.
He was attired in clerical black, all save his hat, which was brown--a
low-crowned, brown straw hat adorned with a brown ribbon. Mrs. Penelope
Moore, his wife, profound as was her appreciation of the dignity of his
position as rector of the parish, could yet never quite resist the
temptation of getting for him, now and then, a straw hat, and a straw
hat, too, which was not black; to her sense a straw hat was youth, and
to her sense the rector was young. It was in a straw hat that she had
first beheld and admired him as the handsomest, as well as the most
perfect, of men; and so in a straw hat she still occasionally sent him
forth, gazing at the back view of it and him, from the rickety windows
of her Gothic rectory, with much satisfaction, as he went down the path
towards the gate on his way to some of the gentle Gracias
entertainments. For of course he wore it only on such light, unofficial
occasions.

Dr. Kirby, meanwhile, was making the circuit of the orange grove. He
stopped an