, and take
The winds of March with beauty,'"

he said, giving her a basket of hepaticas and winter-green.

Marguerite danced away with the purple trophy, and, emptying a carafe
into a dish of moss that stood near, took them to Mrs. Laudersdale, and,
sitting on the footstool, began to rearrange them. It was curious to
see, that, while Mrs. Laudersdale lifted each blossom and let the stem
lie across her hand, she suffered it to fall into the place designated
for it by Marguerite's fingers, that sparkled in the mosaic till double
wreaths of gold-threaded purple rose from the bed of vivid moss and
melted into a fringe of the starry spires of winter-green.

"Is it not sweet?" said she then, bending over it.

"They have no scent," said her mother.

"Oh, yes, indeed! the very finest, the most delicate, a kind of aerial
perfume; they must of course alchemize the air into which they waste
their fibres with some sweetness."

"A smell of earth fresh from 'wholesome drench of April rains,'" said
Mr. Raleigh, taking the dish of white porcelain between his brown,
slender hands. "An immature scent, just such an innocent breath as
should precede the epigea, that spicy, exhaustive wealth of savor, that
complete maturity of odor, marriage of daphne and linnaea. The charm of
these first bidders for the year's favor is neither in the ethereal
texture, the depth or delicacy of tint, nor the large-lobed,
blood-stained, ancient leaves. This imponderable soul gives them such a
helpless air of babyhood."

"Is fragrance the flower's soul?" asked Marguerite. "Then anemones are
not divinely gifted. And yet you said, the other day, that to paint my
portrait would be to paint an anemone."

"A satisfactory specimen in the family-gallery," said Mrs. Purcell.

"A flaw in the indictment!" replied Mr. Raleigh. "I am not one of those
who paint the lily."

"Though you've certainly added a perfume to the violet," remarked Mr.
Frederic Heath, with that sweetly lingering accent familiarly called the
drawl, as he looked at the hepaticas.

"I don't think it very complimentary, at any rate," continued
Marguerite. "They are not lovely after bloom,--only the little
pink-streaked, budded bells, that hang so demurely. _Oui, da!_ I have
exchanged great queen magnolias for rues; what will you give me for
pomegranates and oleanders?"

"Are the old oleanders in the garden yet?" asked Mrs. Laudersdale.

"Not the very same. The hurricane destroyed tho