"_Next_ year! my dear. I am wanting some flowers for _to-night_."
"To-night! Oh, dear, let me think. Why won't the things make haste? You must have _something_, of course."
What was there? A good many things in bud, but had they been out I could not have cut them. Just the one first specimen! To cut from a plant you need such a big show, and all the tall perennials were no good anyway for the table decoration. The blue cornflowers were coming; the godetias held promising buds of pinkiness; the Shirley poppies, too, and the sweet-peas; but for to-night! Everything was for to-morrow. Down the garden we walked, hope always deferred, and beyond the garden shone a field of brilliantly deep red. I caught my breath. "Isn't it lovely? It is old Mason's saint-foin; let us take some. And see, there are white daisies in the hay there, mine aren't out yet. And with grasses, those lovely, wavy grasses! don't you think that will do?"
The table did look lovely, but small thanks to my garden, I felt; though the Other One cared not for that, and comforted me by saying that gardening had certainly developed my resources if not the flowers.
The wild rose and honeysuckle scent the hedges, the tall white daisies shine in the grass, the ruddy chickweed, with the setting sun behind, glows like the evening clouds; and the tall, dainty, white meadow-sweet offers itself to one's hand. Were it a garden flower we should prize it almost as we do gypsophila. But Nature does not mean her favourites to be promoted to the drawing-room. Their rustic beauty fades at once, and it seems truly unkind to cut so short their joyous sunny day.
The dinner-table that had caused me so much anxiety was specially needed for an American friend of one of the Others. She greeted the pretty effect with, "My! how cunning! Do all these pretty things grow in your garden, Mistress Mary?"
"You have a little rhyme about Mary and her garden, haven't you? And her lamb, too. Have you a lamb?"
"Oh, yes," said one of the Others, "she has a lamb, the new version of that rhyme, too, 'with coat as black as soot.'"
But what she meant, or why I grew hot, it passes my wisdom to say.
"Say now, do you grow nightingales in your garden, Mistress Mary? I assure you, sir," turning to his Reverence, "I have never yet compassed an introduction to that much-vaunted British institooshon, the nightingale. I am just crazy till I hear those liquid tones, the jug jug and jar jar: such vurry ugly equivalents they sound to me for thrilling notes, but the best, I conclude, our poor speech can do in imitation of that divine melody."