conservatory was an endless grief and care, although superintended by a
thoroughly-taught English gardener, and kept up at unlimited expense.

My sister--for so I was taught to call Evelyn Erle--revelled in this
floral exclusiveness, but to me the dear old garden was far more
delightful and life-giving. I loved our sweet home-flowers better than
those foreign blossoms which lived in an artificial climate, and
answered no thrilling voice of Nature, no internal impulse in their
hot-house growth and development. What stirred me so deeply in April,
stirred also the hyacinth-bulb and the lily of the valley deep in the
earth--warmth, moisture, sunshine and shadow, and sweet spring rain--and
the same fullness of life that throbbed in my veins in June called forth
the rose. There was vivid sympathy here, and I gave my heart to the
garden-flowers as I never could do to the frailer children of the
hot-house, beautiful as they undeniably are.

"Miriam has really a _vulgar_ taste for Nature, as Miss Glen calls it,"
Evelyn said one day, with a curl of her slight, exquisite lip as she
shook away from her painted muslin robe, the butter-cups, heavy with
moisture and radiant with sunshine, which I had laid upon her knee. "She
ought to have been an Irish child and born, in a hovel, don't you think
so, papa?" and she put me aside superciliously. Dirt and Nature were
synonymous terms with her.

My father smiled and laid down his newspaper, then looked at me a little
gravely as I stood downcast by Evelyn.

"You _are_ getting very much sunburnt, Miriam, there is no doubt of
that. A complexion like yours needs greater care for its preservation
than if ten shades fairer. Little daughter, you must wear your bonnet,
or give up running in the garden in the heat of the day."

"I try to impress this on Miriam all the time," said Mrs. Austin,
coming as usual to aid in the assault, "but she is so hard-headed, it is
next to impossible to make her mindful of what I tell her. Miss Glen is
the only one that seems to have any influence over her nowadays." She
said this with a slight, impatient toss of the head, as she paused in
her progress through the room with a huge jar of currant-jelly, she had
been sunning in the dining-room window, poised on the palm of either
hand, jelly that looked like melted rubies, now to be consigned to the
store-room.

"Well, well, we must have patience," was the rejoinder. "She is
young--impulsive (I wish she were m