B FLIGHT F THE •NCESS ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON f presented to the UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO by Mr. Armistead Carter -7. \H THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS AND OTHER PIECES "Enter these encJianted woods , You who dare. Nothing harms beneath the leaves More than waves a swimmer cleave Toss your heart up with the lark, Foot at peace with tnmtse afid worm. Fair you fare. Only at a dread of dark Quaver, and they quit their form. : Thousand eyeballs under hoods Have you by tJie hair. Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare.'''' GEORGE MEREDITH "Jour?ieys ettd in lovers meeting. Every wise man's son doth know.''"' SHAKESPEARB ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS AND OTHER PIECES PORTLAND MAINE THOMAS B MOSHER MDCCCCXII CONTENTS PAGE ix Foreword . The Flight of the Prin- cess .... 3 Old Mortality . . 39 An Old Scotch Gardener 61 "A Penny Plain and Two- pence Coloured" . 77 FOREWORD FOREWORD I ORIGINALLY issued in Long- man's Magazine, (April to October, 1SS5), Prince Otto re- appeared as a single volume in ample time for the holiday book- buyer of that year. No more interesting study in the evolution of Style exists than a comparison between the serial and its immedi- ate careful revision in book form, which must have been done at white heat. As a specimen of the discarded dialogue read the following passage showing with how much finer effect the last words of Seraphina, as they now stand, end the romance. Seldom is judicious excision so instantly apparent. " Lie close," she said, with a deep thrill of speech. " Stir not a finger, dear, or we may both awake. I, too, have dreamed my nightmare. FOREWORD Now, as I sit here, I begin to tell myself there was a Prince in fairy tales, who loved a thing of ice and folly; and under every trial, still loved on; loved the ingrate, the traitor, the insolent — and oh ! still loved, or so I tell myself; and when at last God sent a soul into his fro ward mistress, his great heart leapt up, and he forgave her all," We may concede that from the first Prince Otto was regarded as exotic, — an alien growth, so to speak, — amidst the still lovelier natural flowers of the Stevenson- ian garden. As Mr. Joseph Jacobs tells us : " In thinking over Stevenson's work one is apt to overlook Prifice Otto. It is of so different a gen're^ it has almost a note of insincerity. Yet that very note is cognate with its subject, and in its rococo man- ner it is a perfect bit of novelistic bric-a-brac^ a sort of romance in Dresden china. There is one chapter, however, that redeems it. FOREWORD The flight of the princess through the woods at night is one of the most perfect things Stevenson ever wrote. It is characteristic that it should come with the plunge from courtly artificialities into the open air and nature una- dorned. The character drawing is as firm as elsewhere. . . . All bite the steel with clear-cut lines. Yes, Prince Otto is the Stevenson- ian crux; like not that and you are no true Stevensonian." Critics there were, and possibly critics there are, unable or unwill- ing to admit the deep-veined humanity of the reconciliation scene between Seraphina and her Prince. For us there is in it that touch of nature — passionate, sen- suous, true to love and life, with- out which the book had turned out a mere romantic fiasco. Nowhere else shall we find the natural his- tory of the human passion-flower so exquisitely set forth as in the awakening of Seraphina to a love FOREWORD that will not fade away. It is as perfect as that other immortal scene, the meeting between Rich- ard and Lucy in Meredith's Idyl of First Love, so soon to close in tragic night. Here Stevenson became "the laureate of the joy of life " : of this, despite all self- imposed limitations. The Flight of the Pfincess is the enduring exemplar. II Of the three essays chosen from Memories and Portraits, (1887), each has its own delightful excuse for being, and they have been chosen because of an inner divin- ity which is, perhaps, most clearly seen in the first of the trio. As Professor Walter Raleigh points out : " An equal sense of the real- ities of life and death gives the force of a natural law to the pathos of Old Mortality, that essay in which Stevenson pays FOREWORD passionate tribute to the memory of his early friend, who ' had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom.' The whole description, down to the marvellous quotation from Bunyan that closes it, is one of the sovereign passages of modem literature; the pathos of it is pure and elemental, like the rush of a cleansing wind, or the onset of the legions commanded by 'The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord, That all the misbelieving and black Horde Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.' " When we come to the end of this little gallery of portraits we are in position to see with Raleigh that Stevenson " shares with Gold- smith and Montaigne, his own FOREWORD favourite, the happy privilege of making lovers among his readers." And as Thackeray said of Gold- smith so we may 'conclude of "R. L. S.": "To be the most beloved of English writers — what a title that is for a man ! " THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS AND OTHER PIECES THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS I THE porter, drawn by the growing turmoil, had van- ished from the postern, and the door stood open on the darkness of the night. As Seraphina fled up the terraces, the cries and loud footing of the mob drew nearer the doomed palace ; the rush was like the rush of cavalry; the sound of shattering lamps tingled above the rest; and overtowering all, she heard her own name bandied among the shouters. A bugle sounded at the door of the guard- room ; one gun was fired ; and then, with the yell of hundreds, Mittwalden Palace was carried at a rush. Sped by these dire sounds and voices, the Princess scaled the long garden, skimming like a bird THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS the Starlit stairw^ays; crossed the Park, which was in that place narrow; and plunged upon the farther side into the rude shelter of the forest. So, at a bound, she left the discretion and the cheerful lamps of palace even- ings; ceased utterly to be a sov- ereign lady ; and, falling from the whole height of civilisation, ran forth into the woods, a ragged Cinderella. She went direct before her through an open tract of the for- est, full of brush and birches, and where the starlight guided her; and beyond that again, must thread the columned blackness of a pine grove joining overhead the thatch of its long branches. At that hour, the place was breath- less; a horror of night like a pres- ence occupied that dungeon of the wood; and she went groping, knocking against the boles — her ear, betweenwhiles, strained to aching and yet unrewarded. THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS But the slope of the ground was upward, and encouraged her; and presently she issued on a rocky hill that stood forth above the sea of forest. All around were other hilltops, big and little ; sable vales of forest between; overhead the open heaven and the brilliancy of countless stars; and along the western sky the dim forms of mountains. The glory of the great night laid hold upon her; her eyes shone with stars; she dipped her sight into the coolness and brightness of the sky, as she might have dipped her wrist into a spring; and her heart, at that ethereal shock, began to move more soberly. The sun that sails overhead, ploughing into gold the fields of daylight azure and utter- ing the signal to man's myriads, has no word apart for man the individual; and the moon, like a violin, only praises and laments our private destiny. The stars alone, cheerful whisperers, confer THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS quietly with each of us like friends ; they give ear to our sorrows smil- ingly, like wise old men, rich in tolerance; and by their double scale, so small to the eye, so vast to the imagination, they keep be- fore the mind the double charac- ter of man's nature and fate. There sate the Princess, beauti- fully looking upon beauty, in coun- cil with these glad advisers. Bright like pictures, clear like a voice in the porches of her ear, memory re-enacted the tumult of the even- ing: The Countess and the danc- ing fan, the big Baron on his knees, the blood on the polished floor, the knocking, the swing of the litter down the avenue of lamps, the messenger, the cries of the charging mob; and yet all were far away and phantasmal, and she was still healingly conscious of the peace and glory of the night. She looked towards Mittwalden ; and above the hilltop, which al- ready hid it from her view, a throb- THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS lung redness hinted of fire. Better so : better so, that she should fall with tragic greatness, lit by a blaz- ing palace ! She felt not a trace of pity for Gondremark or of con- cern for Griinewald: that period of her life was closed for ever, a wrench of wounded vanity alone surviving. She had but one clear idea: to flee; — and another, ob- scure and half-rejected, although still obeyed: to flee in the direc- tion of the Felsenburg. She had a duty to perform, she must free Otto — so her mind said, very coldly; but her heart embraced the notion of that duty even with ardour, and her hands began to yearn for the grasp of kindness. She rose, with a start of recol- lection, and plunged down the slope into the covert. The woods received and closed upon her. Once more, she wandered and hasted in a blot, uncheered, unpi- loted. Here and there, indeed, through rents in the wood-roof, a THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS glimmer attracted her; here and there, a tree stood out among its neighbours by some force of out- line; here and there, a brushing among the leaves, a notable black- ness, a dim shine, relieved, only to exaggerate, the solid oppression of the night and silence. And betweenwhiles, the unfeatured darkness would redouble and the whole ear of night appear to be gloating on her steps. Now she would stand still, and the silence would grow and grow, till it weighed upon her breathing; and then she would address herself again to run, stumbling, falling, and still hurrying the more. And presently the whole wood rocked and began to run along with hex. The noise of her own mad passage through the silence spread and echoed, and filled the night with terror. Panic hunted her: Panic from the trees reached forth with clutching branches; the darkness was lit up and peopled with strange 8 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS forms and faces. She strangled and fled before her fears. And yet in the last fortress, reason, blown upon by these gusts of ter- ror, still shone with a troubled light. She knew, yet could not act upon her knowledge; she knew that she must stop, and yet she still ran. She was already near madness, when she broke suddenly into a narrow clearing. At the same time the din grew louder, and she became conscious of vague forms and fields of whiteness. And with that the earth gave way; she fell and found her feet again with an incredible shock to her senses, and her mind was swallowed up. When she came again to herself, she was standing to the mid-leg in an icy eddy of a brook, and lean- ing with one hand on the rock from which it poured. The spray had wet her hair. She saw the white cascade, the stars wavering in the shaken pool, foam flitting, THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS and high overhead the tall pines on either hand serenely drinking starshine ; and in the sudden quiet of her spirit, she heard with joy the firm plunge of the cataract in the pool. She scrambled forth dripping. In the face of her proved weakness, to adventure again upon the horror of blackness in the groves were a suicide of life or reason. But here, in the alley of the brook, with the kind stars above her, and the moon presently swimming into sight, she could await the coming of day without alarm. This lane of pine trees ran very rapidly down hill and wound among the woods; but it was a wider thoroughfare than the brook needed, and here and there were little dimpling lawns and coves of the forest, where the starshine slumbered. Such a lawn she paced, taking patience bravely; and now she looked up the hill and saw the brook coming down THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS to her in a series of cascades; and now approached the margin, where it welled among the rushes silent- ly; and now gazed at the great company of heaven with an en- during wonder. The early even- ing had fallen chill, but the night was now temperate; out of the recesses of the wood there 'came mild airs as from a deep and peaceful breathing; and the dew was heavy on the grass and the tight-shut daisies. This was the girl's first night under the naked heaven; and now that her fears were overpast, she was touched to the soul by its serene amenity and peace. Kindly the host of heaven blinked down upon that wander- ing Princess; and the honest brook had no words but to en- courage her. At last she began to be aware of a wonderful revolution, com- pared to which the fire of Mitt- walden Palace was but the crack and flash of a percussion cap. TKB FUGHT OF THE PKINCKSS The countenance with which the pines regarded her began insensi- blj to change ; the grass too, short as it was, and the whole winding staircase of the bro<^*s course, b^an to wear a solemn freshness of appearance. And this slow transggnuation reached hex heart, and^plsgred upon it, and trans- pierced it with a serious thrilL She looked all about; the whole &ce of nature looked back, brim- ful of meaning, finger on hp, leak- ing its glad secret. She looked up. Hearen was almost emptied of stars. Such as still Mngered shone with a changed and waning brightness, and began to faint in their stations. And the colour of the sky itself was the most won- derful; for the rich blue of the ni^t had now melted and soft- ened and bri^tened; and there had succeeded in its place a hue that has no name, and that is nev^r seen but as the herald of morning. "O!" she cried, joy THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS catching at her voice, "O! it is the dawn ! " In a breath she passed over the brook, and looped up her skirts and fairly ran in the dim alleys. As the ran, her ears were aware of many pipings, more beautiful than music; in the small dish- shaped houses in the fork of giant arms, where they had lain all night, lover by lover, warmly pressed, the bright-eyed, big-heart- ed singers began to awaken for the day. Her heart melted and flowed forth to them in kindness. And they, from their small and high perches in the clerestories of the wood cathedral, peered down sidelong at the ragged Princess as she flitted below them on the car- pet of the moss and tassel. Soon she had struggled to a certain hilltop, and saw far before her the silent inflooding of the day. Out of the East it welled and whitened ; the darkness trem- bled into light; and the stars were THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS extinguished like the street-lamps of a human city. The whiteness brightened into silver, the silver warmed into gold, the gold kindled into pure and living fire ; and the face of the East was barred with elemental scarlet. The day drew its first long breath, steady and chill ; and for leagues around the woods sighed and shivered. And then, at one bound, the sun had floated up; and her startled eyes received day's first arrow, and quailed under the buffet. On every side, the shadows leaped from their ambush and fell prone. The day was come, plain and gar- ish ; and up the steep and solitary eastern heaven, the sun, victorious over his competitors, continued slowly and royally to mount. Seraphina drooped for a little, leaning on a pine, the shrill joy of the woodlands mocking her. The shelter of the night, the thrilling and joyous changes of the dawn, were over; and now, in the hot THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS eye of the day, she turned uneasily and looked sighingly about her. Some way off among the lower woods, a pillar of smoke was mounting and melting in the gold and blue. There, surely enough, were human folk, the hearth-sur- rounders. Man's fingers had laid the twigs; it was man's breath that had quickened and encour- aged the baby flames ; and now, as the fire caught, it would be play- ing ruddily on the face of its crea- tor. At the thought, she felt a-cold and little and lost in that great out-of-doors. The electric shock of the young sunbeams and the unhuman beauty of the woods began to irk and daunt her. The covert of the house, the decent privacy of rooms, the swept and regulated fire, all that denotes or beautifies the home life of man, began to draw her as with cords. The pillar of smoke was now risen into some stream of moving air; it began to lean out sideways in a 15 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS pennon ; and thereupon, as though the change had been a summons, Seraphina plunged once more into the labyrinth of the wood. She left day upon the high ground. In the lower groves there still lingered the blue early twilight and the seizing freshness of the dew. But here and there, above this field of shadow, the head of a great outspread pine was already glorious with day; and here and there, through the breaches of the hills, the sunbeams made a great and luminous entry. Here Seraphina hastened along forest paths. She had lost sight of the pilot smoke, which blew another way, and conducted her- self in that great wilderness by- the direction of the sun. But presently fresh signs bespoke the neighbourhood of man ; felled trunks, white slivers from the axe, bundles of green boughs, and stacks of firewood. These guided her forward; until she came forth THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS at last upon the clearing whence the smoke arose. A hut stood in the clear shadow, hard by a brook which made a series of inconsider- able falls; and on the threshold, the Princess saw a sun-burnt and hard-featured woodman, standing with his hands behind his back and gazing skyward. She went to him directly: a beautiful, bright-eyed, and haggard vision ; splendidly arrayed and pit- ifully tattered; the diamond ear- drops still glittering in her ears; and with the movement of her coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged cov- ert of the laces. At that ambigu- ous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Prin- cess as from something elfin. "I am cold," she said, "and weary. Let me rest beside your fire." The woodman was visibly corn- moved, but answered nothing. 17 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS " I will pay," she said, and then repented of the words, catching perhaps a spark of terror from his frightened eyes. But, as usual, her courage rekindled brighter for the check. She put him from the door and entered; and he followed her in superstitious wonder. Within, the hut was rough and dark ; but on the stone that served as hearth, twigs and a few dry branches burned with the brisk sounds and all the variable beauty of fire. The very sight of it com- posed her; she crouched hard by on the earth floor and shivered in the glow, and looked upon the eating blaze wath admiration. The woodman was still staring at his guest : at the wreck of the rich- dress, the bare arms, the bedrag- gled laces and the gems. He found no word to utter. " Give me food," said she, — "here, by the fire." He set down a pitcher of coarse wine, bread, a piece of cheese, and i8 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS a handful of raw onions. The bread was hard and sour, the cheese like leather; even the onion, which ranks with the truffle and the nectarine in the chief place of honour of earth's fruits, is not perhaps a dish for Princesses when raw. But she ate, if not with appetite, with courage; and when she had eaten, did not dis- dain the pitcher. In all her life before, she had not tasted of gross food nor drunk after another ; but a brave woman far more readily accepts a change of circumstances than the bravest man. All that while, the woodman continued to observe her furtively, many low thoughts of fear and greed con- tending in his eyes. She read them clearly, and she knew she must begone. Presently she arose and orfered him a florin. " Will that repay you ? " she asked. But here the man found his 19 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS tongue. "I must have more than that," said he. "It is all I have to give you," she returned, and passed him by serenely. Yet her heart trembled, for she saw his hand stretched forth as if to arrest her, and his unsteady eyes wandering to his axe. A beaten path led westward from the clearing, and she swiftly fol- lowed it. She did not glance be- hind her. But as soon as the least turning of the path had con- cealed her from the woodman's eyes, she slipped among the trees and ran till she deemed herself in safety. By this time the strong sunshine pierced in a thousand places the. pine-thatch of the forest, fired the red boles, irradiated the cool isles of shadow, and burned in jewels on the grass. The gum of these trees was dearer to the senses than the gums of Araby ; each pine, in the lusty morning sunlight, THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS burned its own wood-incense ; and now and then a breeze would rise and toss these rooted censers, and send shade and sun-gem flitting, swift as swallows, thick as bees; and wake a brushing bustle of sounds that murmured and went by. On she passed, and up and down, in sun and shadow; now aloft on the bare ridge among the rocks and birches, with the lizards and the snakes; and anon in the deep grove among sunless pillars. Now she followed wandering wood-paths, in the maze of val- leys; and again, from a hilltop, beheld the distant mountains and the great birds circling under the sky. She would see afar off a nestling hamlet, and go round to avoid it. Below, she traced the course of the foam of mountain torrents. Nearer hand, she saw- where the tender springs welled up in silence, or oozed in green moss ; or in the more favoured hollows a THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS whole family of infant rivers would combine, and tinkle in the stones, and lie in pools to be a bathing- place for sparrows, or fall from the sheer rock in rods of crystal. Upon all these things, as she still sped along in the bright air, she looked with a rapture of surprise and a joyful fainting of the heart; they seemed so novel, they touched so strangely home, they were so hued and scented, they were so beset and canopied by the dome of the blue air of heaven. At length, when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow pool. Stones stood in it, like islands; buUrushes fringed the coast; the floor was paved with the pine needles, and the pines themselves, whose roots made promontories, looked down silently on their green images. She crept to the margin and be- held herself with wonder, a hollow and bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe. The THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS breeze now shook her image ; now it would be marred with flies ; and at that she smiled; and from the fading circles, her counterpart smiled back to her and looked kind- She sat long in the warm sun, and pitied her bare arms that were all bruised and marred with falling, and marvelled to see that she was dirty, and could not grow- to believe that she had gone so long in such a strange disorder. Then, with a sigh, she addressed herself to make a toilet by that forest mirror, washed herself pure from all the stains of her adven- ture, took off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief, rearranged the tatters of her dress, and took down the folds of her hair. She shook it round her face, and the pool repeated her thus veiled. Her hair had smelt like violets, she remembered Otto say- ing; and so now she tried to smell it, and then shook her head, and laughed a little, sadly, to herself. 23 THE FLIGHT OF THE FRINCESS The laugh was returned upon her m a childish echo. She looked up ; and lo 1 two children looking on, — a small girl and a yet smaller boy, standing, like playthings, by the pool, below a spreading pine. Seraphrna was not fond of chil- dren, and now she was startled to the heart. " Who are you ? " she cried, hoarsely. The mites huddled together and drew back; and Seraphina's heart reproached her that she should have frightened things so quaint and little, and yet alive with senses. She thought upon the birds and looked again at her two visitors; so little larger and so far more innocent. On their clear faces, as in a pool, she saw the reflection of their fears. With gracious pur- pose she arose. "Come," she said, "do not be afraid of me," and took a step towards them. But alas! at the first movement, 24 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS the two poor babes in the wood turned and ran helter-skelter from the Princess, The most desolate pang was struck into the girl's heart. Here she was, twenty-two — soon twen- ty-three — and not a creature loved her; none but Otto; and would even he forgive ? If she began weeping in these woods alone, it would mean death or madness. Hastily she trod the thoughts out like a burning paper; hastily rolled up her locks, and with terror dogging her, and her whole bosom sick with grief, resumed her journey Past ten in the forenoon, she struck a highroad, marching in that place up-hill between two stately groves, a river of sunlight ; and here, dead weary, careless of consequences, and taking some courage from the human and civ- ilised neighbourhood of the road, she stretched herself on the green margin in the shadow of a tree. 25 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS Sleep closed on her, at first with a horror of fainting, but when she ceased to struggle, kindly em- bracing her. So she was taken home for a little, from all her toils and sorrows, to her Father's arms. And there in the meanwhile her body lay exposed by the high- way-side, in tattered finery; and on either hand from the woods the birds came flying by and call- ing upon others, and debated in their own tongue this strange appearance. II A little below where they stood, a good-sized brook passed below the road, which overleapt it in a single arch. On one bank of that loquacious water a footpath de- scended a green dell. Here it was rocky and stony, and lay on the steep scarps of the ravine; here it was choked with brambles ; and there, in fairy haughs, it lay 26 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS for a few paces evenly on the green turf. Like a sponge, the hillside oozed with well-water. The burn kept growing both in force and volume; at every leap it fell with heavier plunges and span more widely in the pool. Great had been the labours of that stream, and great and agree- able the changes it had wrought. It had cut through dykes of stub- born rock, and now, like a blow- ing dolphin, spouted through the orifice ; along all its humble coasts, it had undermined and rafted- down the goodlier timber of the forest; and on these rough clear- ings it now set and tended prim- rose gardens, and planted woods of willow, and made a favourite of the silver birch. Through all these friendly features the path, its human acolyte, conducted our two wanderers downward, — Otto before, still pausing at the more difficult passages to lend assist- ance; the Princess following. THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS From time to time, when he turned to help her, her face would lighten upon his — her eyes, half despe- rately, woo him. He saw, but dared not understand. " She does not love me," he told himself, with magnanimity. " This is re- morse or gratitude ; I were no gentleman, no, nor yet a man, if I presumed upon these pitiful concessions." Some way down the glen, the stream, already grown to a good bulk of water, was rudely dammed across, and about a third of it abducted in a wooden trough. Gayly the pure water, air's first cousin, fleeted along the rude aqueduct, whose sides and floor it had made green with grasses. The path, bearing it close com- pany, threaded a wilderness of briar and wild rose. And pres- ently, a little in front, the brown top of a mill and the tall mill- wheel, sprapng diamonds, arose in the narrows of the glen ; at the 28 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS same time the snoring music of the saws broke the silence. The miller, hearing steps, came forth to his door, and both he and Otto started. " Good-morning, miller," said the Prince. " You were right, it seems, and I was wrong. I give you the news, and bid you to Mitt- walden. My throne has fallen — great was the fall of it! — and your good friends of the Phoenix bear the rule." The red-faced miller looked supreme astonishment. "And your Highness?" he gasped. " My Highness is running away," replied Otto, "straight for the frontier." " Leaving Griinewald ? " cried the man. "Your father's son? It's not to be permitted!" " Do you arrest us, friend ? " asked Otto, smiling. " Arrest you ? I ? " exclaimed the man. "For what does your Highness take me ? ^Vhy, sir, I 29 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS make sure there is not a man in Griinewald would lay hands upon you." "O, many, many," said the Prince ; *' but from you, who were bold with me in my greatness, I should even look for aid in my distress." The miller became the colour of beetroot. "You may say so indeed," said he. " And mean- while, will you and your lady step into my house ? " " We have not time for that," replied the Prince; "but if you will oblige us with a cup of wine without here, you will give a pleasure and a service, both in one." The miller once m.ore coloured to the nape. He hastened to bring forth wine in a pitcher and three bright crystal tumblers. "Your Highness must not sup- pose," he said, as he filled them, "that I am an habitual drinker. The time when I had the misfor- 30 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS tune to encounter you, I was a trifle overtaken, I allow; but a more sober man than I am in my ordinar}-, I do not know where you are to look for; and even this glass that I drink to you (and to the lady) is quite an unusual recreation." The wine was drunk with due rustic courtesies; and then, refus- ing further hospitality, Otto and Seraphina once more proceeded to descend the glen, which now began to open and to be invaded by the taller trees. " I owed that man a repara- tion," said the Prince; "for when we met I was in the wrong and put a sore affront upon him. I judge by myself, perhaps; but I begin to think that no one is the better for a humiliation." " But some have to be taught so," she replied. " Well, well," he said, with a painful embarrassment. " Well, well. But let us think of safety. 3^ THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS My miller is all very good, but I do not pin my faith to him. To follow down this stream will bring us, but after innumerable wind- ings, to my house. Here, up this glade, there lies a cross-cut — the world's end for solitude — the very deer scarce visit it. Are you too tired, or could you pass that way ? " " Choose the path. Otto. I will follow you," she said. " No," he replied, with a sin- gular imbecility of manner and appearance, " but I meant the path was rough. It lies, all the way, by glade and dingle, and the dingles are both deep and thorny." "Lead on," she said. "Are you not Otto the Hunter?" They had now burst across a veil of unden\-ood, and were come into a lawn among the forest, very green and innocent, and solemnly surrounded by trees. Otto paused on the margin, looking about him with delight; then his glance re- THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS turned to Seraphina, as she stood framed in that sylvan pleasantness and looking at her husband with undecipherable eyes. A weakness both of the body and mind fell on him like the beginnings of sleep; the cords of his activity were re- laxed, his eyes clung to her. "Let us rest," he said; and he made her sit down, and himself sat down beside her on the slope of an in- considerable mound. She sat with her eyes down- cast, her slim hand dabbling in grass, like a maid waiting for love's summons. The sound of the wind in the forest swelled and sank, and drew near them with a run- ning rush, and died away and away in the distance into fainting whispers. Nearer hand, a bird out of the deep covert uttered broken and anxious notes. All this seemed but a halting prelude to speech. To Otto it seemed as if the whole frame of nature were waiting for his words ; and yet his 33 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS pride kept him silent. The longer he watched that slender and pale hand plucking at the grasses, the harder and rougher grew the fight between pride and its kindly ad- versary. " Seraphina," he said at last, " it is right you should know one thing: I never . . . ." He was about to say " doubted you," but was that true ? And, if true, was it generous to speak of it ? Silence succeeded. "I pray you, tell it me," she said; "tell it me, in pity." " I mean only this," he resumed, " that I understand all, and do not blame you. I understand how the brave woman must look down on the weak man. I think you were wrong in some things; but I have tried to understand it, and I do. I do not need to forget or to forgive, Seraphina, for I have understood." "I know what I have done," she said. " I am not so weak that 34 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS I can be deceived with kind speeches. I know what I have been — I see myself. I am not worth your anger, how much less to be forgiven ! In all this down- fall and misery, I see only me and you : you, as you have been always; me, as I was — me, above all! O yes, I see myself: and what can I think ? " " Ah, then, let us reverse the parts ! " said Otto. *' It is our- selves we cannot forgive, when we deny forgiveness to another — so a friend told me last night. On these terms, Seraphina, you see how generously I have for- given myself. But am not / to be forgiven ? Come, then, forgive yourself — and me." She did not answer in words, but reached out her hand to him quickly. He took it; and as the smooth fingers settled and nestled in his, love ran to and fro between them in tender and transforming currents. 35 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS "Seraphina," he cried, "O, for- get the past! Let me serve and help you; let me be your servant; it is enough for me to serve you and to be near you; let me be near you, dear — do not send me away." He hurried his pleading like the speech of a frightened child. " It is not love," he went on ; "I do not ask for love ; my love is enough. . . ." " Otto ! " she said, as if in pain. He looked up into her face. It was wrung with the very ecstasy of tenderness and anguish; on her features, and most of all in her changed eyes, there shone the very light of love. "Seraphina?" he cried aloud, and with a sudden, tuneless voice-, " Seraphina?" " Look round you at this glade," she cried, "and where the leaves are coming on young trees, and the flowers begin to blossom. This is where we meet, meet for the first time ; it is so much better 36 THE FLIGHT OF THE PRINCESS to forget and to be bom again. O, what a pit there is for sins — God's mercy, man's oblivion ! " " Seraphina," he said, "let it be so, indeed; let all that was be merely the abuse of dreaming; let me begin again, a stranger. I have dreamed, in a long dream, that I adored a girl unkind and beautiful ; in all things my superior, but still cold like ice. And again I dreamed, and thought she changed and melted, glowed and turned to me. And I — who had no merit but a love, slavish and unerect — lay close, and durst not move for fear of waking." " Lie close," she said, with a deep thrill of speech. So they spake in the spring woods; and meanwhile, in Mitt- walden Rath-haus the Republic was declared. OLD MORTALITY I THERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of many tall memo- rials, fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant incidents are woven -snth my memory of the place. I here made friends with a certain plain old gentle- man, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one 39 OLD MORTALITY eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth Uke winter sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild heart flying; and once — she possibly remembers — the wise Eugenia followed me to that aus- tere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the braid. But for the most part I went there solitary and, with irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the for- gotten. Name after name, and to each the conventional attribu- tions and the idle dates: a regi- ment of the unknown that had- been the joy of mothers, and had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had received a 40 OLD MORTALITY picture ; and he, with his comely, florid countenance, bewigged and habited in scariet, and in his day combining fame and popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of phantom appella- tions. It was then possible to leave behind us something more explicit than these severe, monot- onous and lying epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a painted picture and what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed beneath that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the house- maid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, the fame of that bewigged philos- opher melted like a raindrop in the sea. And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank ; his pas- 41 OLD MORTALITY sions, like Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibil- ity, and volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with contemp- tuous surprise; there also he seems to walk among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see him- self from without and his fellows from within : to know his own for one among the thousand unde- noted countenances of the city street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope? In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloro- form — for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a divine self- 42 OLD MORTALITY pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambi- tious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do. The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and in evil part ; that young men may come to think of time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the memorials of the dead. 43 OLD MORTALITY Books were the proper remedy : books of vivid human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, impor- tance and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger- back not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little ; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is perhaps not 44 OLD MORTALITY far off when people will begin to count Moll Flanders, ay, or The Country Wife, more wholesome and more pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism. But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann. And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave^ diggers, and was weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was dayspring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. Not that I began to see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally from the prison win- dows of my affectation. Once I remember to have observed two working-women with a baby halt- ing by a grave ; there was some- thing monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the 45 OLD MORTALITY Other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immor- telles under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, draw- ing near, I overheard their judg- ment on that wonder. *' Eh ! what extravagance ! " To a youth afflicted with the callosity of senti- ment, this quaint and pregnant saying appeared merely base. My acquaintance with grave- diggers, considering its length, was unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his labours; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey ; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the species varied with the season of the year. But this was the very poetry of the profession. The others whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint flavour 46 OLD MORTALITY of the gardener hung about them, but sophisticated and disbloomed. They had engagements to keep, not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with mankind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there was no leisure for the relish- ing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business; they liked well to open long closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and dates. It would be "in fifty-twa" that such a tomb was last opened for " Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their past patients — familiarly but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a servant, whom we forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the mor- 47 OLD MORTALITY tuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our race. To suspect Shake- speare in his maturity of a super- ficial touch savours of paradox ; yet he was surely in error when he attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton differs from the Scotch. The " goodman delver," reckoning up his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride common among sex- tons. A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the shelves ; but the grave-digger numbers his graves. He would indeed be something different from human if his solitary open- air and tragic labours left not a broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, among the 48 OLD MORTALITY cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, he awaits the continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts them; and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the kindly influence of habit grows to be his pride and pleasure. There are many common stories telling how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monk- ton, to whose unsuffering bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of the churchyard; and through a bull's-eye pane above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a Moderate : 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of deathbed dispositions; for he told the old 49 OLD MORTALITY man that he had lived beyond man's natural years, that his life had been easy and reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it now behoved him unregretfully to gird his loins and follow the majority. The grave-digger heard him out; then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his life- long labours. *' Doctor," he said, " I ha'e laid three hunner and fower-score in that kirkyaird; an it had been His w^ull," indicating Heaven, " I would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made out the fower hun- ner." But it w'as not to be ; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry him. 50 OLD MORTALITY II I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten ; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue ; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and comer of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudi- ments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered 51 OLD MORTALITY guise ; no longer as a doom pecu- liar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a power that wounds him far more ten- derly, not without solemn com- pensa^ons, taking and giving, bereaving and yet storing up. The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble fallibility. When we have fallen through storey after storey of our vanity and aspiration, and sit rue- ful among the ruins, then it is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary life ; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that at the last, when 52 OLD MORTALITY such a pin falls out — when there vanishes in the least breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our supply — when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to memor)- and shadow, there falls along ^^•ith him a whole wing of the palace of our life. Ill One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most serene and genial by disposition ; full of racy words and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student gentle and 53 OLD MORTALITY attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop to play with us, but held him marked for higher destinies ; we loved his notice; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he v.alked among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most influential life. The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, look- ing back, I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding, urbanity and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent and inhumane ; and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish honest senti- ment. I can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the 54 OLD MORTALITY lamplit streets, La ci darem la mano on his lips, a noble figure of a youth, but following vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his self- respect, miserably went down. Yxovci this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them grad- ually, with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth ; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought 55 OLD MORTALITY him down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still without com- plaint, still finding interests; to his last step gentle, urbane and with the will to smile. The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him, the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and pointed with a jest. You would 56 OLD MORTALITY not have dreamed, if you had known him then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and wisely counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts that we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we disem- bosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the gar- den of his gifts ; his whole city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by the throat; and to see him there, so gentle, patient, brave and pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to pity him. Even if the old fault 57 OLD MORTALITY flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost bat- tle, he should have still the energy to fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly abandon, like one who condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance. But he had held an inquest and passed sentence : mene^ mene ; and condemned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough ; had earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right to. murmur. Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength; but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had betrayed him — "for our strength is weakness" OLD MORTALITY — he began to blossom and bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight : the burden that he bore thrown down before the great deliverer. We "in the vast cathedral leave him; God accept him, Christ receive him ! " IV If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the dead, these foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the difficult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat. I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place; pause, with a shrug of pity, mar- velling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most 59 OLD MORTALITY uncalled for, and an ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a reproach; they honour him for silent lessons; they cherish his example; and in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead. For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the valley of humiliation ; — of whom Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had the hard hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and have in this place found the words of life." AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER I THINK I might almost have said the last: somewhere, in- deed, in the uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the south-western hills there may yet linger a decrepid represeniative of this bygone good fellowship ; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew Fairservice, — though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modem flower-plots. There was a dignity about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who had come through the train- ing of the Covenant, and been 6i AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER nourished in his youth on Walker^s Lives and The Hind let Loose. Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch preserved of his old-fash- ioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as a genius loci. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks over- grown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from the northwest comer. The garden- and gardener seem part and parcel of each other. When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phan- tasmal: the best that I can say may convey some notion to those 62 AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER that never saw him, but to me it will be ever impotent. The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking horse. Latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic, con- sidering a reference to the parish register worth all the reasons in the world, " / am old and well stricken in years" he was wont to say; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the argu- ment. Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener. He shrank the very place he culti- vated. The dignity and reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days. He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity. He told of places where under gar- 63 AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER deners had trembled at his looks, where there were meres and swan- neries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad shrubbery' in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots. You were thrown at once into an invidious position. You felt that you were profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will con- sented to your vulgar rule. Invol- untarily you compared yourself with the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen who may have given his sons and his condescen- sion to the fallen Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fan- ciful and metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your gar- den, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile 64 AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER section of the garden with a vege- table that none of us could eat, in supreme contempt for our opin- ion. If you asked him to send you in one of your o\N-n artichokes, " That I luull, mem" he would say, " with pleasure, for it is mair blessed to give than to receive" Ay, and even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to his own inclination, and he went away, stately and sad, pro- fessing that '■''our wull was his pleasure^'' but yet reminding us that he would do it *' with fee lift's" — even then, I say, the trium- phant master felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on suf- ferance only, that he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and that the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient merit of the unworthy takes." In flowers his taste was old- fashioned and catholic; affecting 6S AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses, and holding in supreme aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned or wild. There was one exception to this sweep- ing ban. Foxgloves, though un- doubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but loved; and when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipulated his bill in order to save every stately stem. In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in that tone that only actors and the old-fashioned com- mon folk can use nowadays, his heart grew '■'• proud'" within him when he came on a bum-course among the braes of Manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies; and not all his appren- ticeship and practice for so many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish recollec- tions from his heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all that was bygone. 66 AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER He abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where he had served before, he came back full of little pre-RaphaeUte reminis- cences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have shaken hands \\-ith Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques. But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers together. They were but gamishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments for ladies' chimney- shelves. It was towards his cauli- flowers and peas and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His prefer- ence for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flower-plots, and an outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the 67 AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER lawn. He would prelect over some thriving plant with won- derful enthusiasm, piling reminis- cence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens. Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed, raised '•'■ finer