ould say to
herself, Edward still lives, and she herself was still remaining in the
closest relation toward him.

CHAPTER IX

The spring was come; it was late, but it therefore burst out more
rapidly and more exhilaratingly than usual. Ottilie now found in the
garden the fruits of her carefulness. Everything shot up and came out in
leaf and flower at its proper time. A number of plants which she had
been training up under glass frames and in hotbeds, now burst forward at
once to meet, at last, the advances of nature; and whatever there was to
do, and to take care of, it did not remain the mere labor of hope which
it had been, but brought its reward in immediate and substantial
enjoyment.

There was many a chasm, however, among the finest shoots produced by
Luciana's wild ways, for which she had to console the gardener, and the
symmetry of many a leafy coronet was destroyed. She tried to encourage
him to hope that it would all be soon restored again, but he had too
deep a feeling, and too pure an idea of the nature of his business, for
such grounds of comfort to be of much service to him. Little as the
gardener allowed himself to have his attention dissipated by other
tastes and inclinations, he could the less bear to have the peaceful
course interrupted which the plant follows toward its enduring or its
transient perfection. A plant is like a self-willed man, out of whom we
can obtain all which we desire, if we will only treat him his own way. A
calm eye, a silent method, in all seasons of the year, and at every
hour, to do exactly what has then to be done, is required of no one
perhaps more than of a gardener. These qualities the good man possessed
in an eminent degree, and it was on that account that Ottilie liked so
well to work with him; but for some time past he had not found himself
able to exercise his peculiar talent with any pleasure to himself.
Whatever concerned the fruit-gardening or kitchen-gardening, as well as
whatever had in time past been required in the ornamental gardens, he
understood perfectly. One man succeeds in one thing, another in another;
he succeeded in these. In his management of the orangery, of the bulbous
flowers, in budding shoots and growing cuttings from the carnations and
auriculas, he might challenge nature herself. But the new ornamental
shrubs and fashionable flowers remained in a measure strange to him. He
had a kind of shyness of the endless field of botany, which had