IF thou couldst know thine own sweetness, O little one, perfect and sweet, Thou wouldst be a child forever; Completer, whilst incomplete. FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA Μ' First Chronicle JACK O' LANTERN I ISS MIRANDA SAWYER'S old-fashioned garden was the pleasantest spot in Riverboro on a sunny July morning. The rich color of the brick house gleamed and glowed through the shade of the elms and maples. Luxuriant hop-vines clambered up the lightningrods and water-spouts, hanging their delicate cluster's here and there in graceful profusion. Woodbine transformed the old shed and tool-house to things of beauty, and the flower-beds themselves were the prettiest and most fragrant in all the countryside. A row of dahlias ran directly around the garden spot, dahlias scarlet, gold, and variegated. In the very centre was a round plot where the upturned faces of a thousand pansies smiled amid their leaves, and in the four corners were triangular blocks of sweet phlox over which the butterflies fluttered unceasingly. In the spaces between ran a riot of portulaca and nasturtiums, while in the more regular, shell-bordered beds grew spirea and gillyflowers, mignonette, marigolds, and clove pinks. Back of the barn and encroaching on the edge of the hay-field was a grove of sweet clover whose white feathery tips fairly bent under the assaults of the bees, while banks of aromatic mint and thyme drank in the sunshine and sent it out again into the summer air, warm and deliciously odorous. The hollyhocks were Miss Sawyer's pride, and they grew in a stately line beneath the four kitchen windows, their tapering tips set thickly with gay satin circlets of pink or lavender or crimson. "They grow something like steeples," thought little Rebecca Randall, who was weeding the bed, "and the flat, round flowers are like rosettes; but steeples would n't be studded with rosettes, so if you were writing about them in a composition you'd have to give up one or the other, and I think I'll give up the steeples : Gay little hollyhock Lifting your head, Out from your bed. It's a pity the hollyhock is n't really little, instead of steepling up to the window-top, but I can't say, 'Gay tall hollyhock.' . . . I might have it 'Lines to a Hollyhock in May,' for then it would be small; but oh, no! I forgot; in May it would n't be bloom |