om some firm in New York that
tells alt about herb-growing, and how difficult it is to get the ones
needed for condiments and perfumes, and offering to buy first-class
lavender and thyme and bergamot and sweet fern and things of that kind
in any quantities at a good price. She had shown it to the little old
ladies who had been secretly grieving at the separation from their
garden out on their poorly rented farm, and the leaven had worked--on
Mrs. Hargrove also. They go back to the farm and she with them! She had
decided on raising mint to both dry and ship fresh, because he of the
gay pajamas always liked to have it strong and fresh for the julep of
his ancestors. I hope she won't forget to take that pattern of Japanese
extraction with her and make some for the Crag now and then, for it will
save my time. Horrors!

"We have fully decided on our course of action, Jane, and Evelina,
dears," said Cousin Jasmine in a positive little manner that she would
have been as incapable of a month ago, as is a pet kitten of barking at
the family dog, "but we do so dread to break it to dear James, because
we feel that he may think we are not happy under his roof and be
distressed. Do you believe we shall be able to make him see that we must
pursue our independent life, though always needing the support of his
affection and interest?"

"I believe you will, Cousin Jasmine," I said, wanting to both laugh and
cry to see the Crag's burdens begin to roll off his shoulders like this.
And the tears that didn't rise would have been real ones, too, for I
found that, down in the corner of my heart, I had adored the picture of
my oak with the tender little old vines clinging around him. It was the
producing gourd I had most objected to and I couldn't see but she would
be there until I unclasped her tendrils.

But I was forgetting that, in the modern theory of thought-waves, it is
the simplest minds that get the ripples first and hardest. Sallie came
over just as soon as the other delegation had got home to take the twins
off her hands. Jane had gone upstairs to make more calculations on our
reconstruction, and I was trying to get a large deep breath.

"Evelina." she said, as she sank in a chair near me and fastened her
large, very young-in-soul, eyes on mine, "were you just joking Nell, or
did you mean it, when you said the other day that you thought it would
be cowardly of a woman not to show a man that she loved him, if he for
any reason wa