ward--why, the sun-dial will show the time!"--and
although he made no sign, she knew there were little puckers of
amused approval about her father's mouth.

As if she could ever want anything more than a sun-dial! she thought,
while she passed along the borders, harvesting her little crop. She
had finished with the hollyhocks, and now she was bending over a bed
of withered columbines. And there were the foxglove seeds still
clinging. Really, it was almost impossible to keep up. How brilliant
the salvia was to-day, and what a brave second blossoming that was of
the delphinium, its knightly spurs, metallic blue, gleaming in the
sun!

"No," she declared to herself, "there will never be anything so much
worth while as the garden. Why, of course there won't; because Nature
is the best thing in the world--the very best."

"Plase, ma'am, will ye gimme a bowkay?"

Olivia turned, startled by a voice so near at hand, for she had heard
no footfall on the thick turf. There, in the centre of the grass-grown
space, stood two comical little midgets, their smutty yet cherubic
faces blooming brightly above garments highly coloured and earthy,
too, as the autumn garden-beds.

[Illustration: "Please ma'am, will ye gimme a bowkay?"]

"Dear me!" Olivia laughed, "how things do sprout in a garden! Did you
come right up out of the ground?"

"Plase, ma'am, a bowkay! Me mudder's sick an' me fader's goned away."

The speaker, a boy of five, stood holding by the hand something in the
way of a sister, about two sizes smaller. At Olivia's little joke,
which they did not in the least understand, they had both grinned
sympathetically, showing rows of diminutive teeth as white and even as
snow-berries.

"Bless your little hearts, of course you shall have a bouquet! Come
and choose one,"--and taking a hand of each Olivia led them slowly
along the brilliant borders.

They were a bit shy at first, but they soon picked up their courage,
and Patsy fell to accumulating a mass of incongruous blossoms whose
colours fought each other tooth and nail. Little Biddy, more modest,
as beseemed her inferior rank in the scale of being, fixed her heart
upon a single flame-flower which absolutely refused to reconcile
itself with the ingenuous pink of her calico frock.

"How long has your mother been ill?" Olivia asked of the boy, who by
this time was quite hidden behind a perfect forest of asters and
larkspur and lobelia cardinalis.

"Me mudder's always s