useless tle old Mower chop, 1 tans ithe El Mowe? chops he thevend of the lanes ime after time after time to the struggles for a minute existence at I At the very luckiest we never hope to get more than a bedragg-Ted dozen of pink carnations, or a fapent bunch of golden-rod. And yet, time and again we walk down the lane to meet with the inevitable disillusionment. Or at least, did formerly, though we rather wotider now if we shall continue to ido this as before.
I'he flower shop must have had, Towly as it was, some kind of intrinsic worth to lure us back in that fashion. It always seemed to lus that it most have started out on quite a pretentious scale, somewhere back in the dark ages, and we felt that it had arrived at this Gishevelled state through some unforeseeable circumstance, Tt had a green-house, bespattered with endless broken window panes, and inside were long ledges filled with small, inconsequential plants, 'A rusty, sprinkling can lifted an incompetent spout amid the "seedy" disarray of potted plants, and often kas we had peeped into the mildewy in the parable set of computations beginning with ten fingers, for the carnations, and coming down to five in the course of dubious glances.
We supposed that in odd times, between attending hopefully to. our vagrant flower-fancies, she minded the intricacies of those unresponsive flower-pots in the green-house, and it was very difficult to imagine her ever growing impatient over her unproductive tasks.
One day we caught her weaving thwarted white blossoms on wire patterns, as she sat on a low stool under the mat-shed. The pattern smacked unpleasantly of those ornate funeral carriages, which now and then one sees treking through hot summer streets with their ancestral burden bedecked with wilted stems. Looking back, now, feel somehow that the' sight must have been prophetic, For we went past the flower shop few days ago and didn't feel an urge to step under a high archway of artificial white blossoms announced that someone had been folded into the annals of hi them in bloom. Yet, back, or did.
The first person we saw in ably in these visits was an ancient crony, with an enormous wen on hor chin, from which sprouted—more effectively than ever sprouted ling in the green-house—five jormous. black, Amazonian hairs. The old lady always hobbled forward to greet us with crinkled eyes She belonged to a kind of depleted aristocracy of good manners, and her feet were unbelievably stunted in their growth, like the plants and the rest of it, She rather fancied that, Buddha Bei rea encom ig, some day we would buy ancestors. And yesterday, we went back, in spite of our sad accumu! tion of floral experience front the past. Nobody hobbled forward to greet us nor did anyone put ten, fingers though the carnations were still there. "Yet they were, a3 far as we could judge, the same! carnations.
Instead, a very old man with a pompous, if scanty, burzomaster's beard appeared upon th "Other flowers have got"? we queried, And he replied with a faint, but pleasant attempt at salesmanship. "No have got any more." I rather think we really wont go back to that quaint old place again—t.n.w.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.