Houses £2? Gardens 13 



down the mouth with a sulk and a snapping-to ; nor 

 is the brow, furrowed though it be, repellent with a 

 hard-set frown. Her little garden is aglow with white 

 lilies, sweet williams, pansies, and snapdragons ; and 

 the porch under which the owner is sitting is made 

 beauteous in a tangle of honeysuckle and sweet jessa- 

 mine. Old " Fanny " is a spinster. Yet there are 

 letters of faded ink within the brass-bound chest that 

 would show how, long, long ago, her "young man" 

 had courted her. But sailors marry the sea, and the 

 sea will not always relinquish her claim to hold those 

 betrothed to her. And so Old Fanny sits making her 

 lace, and the martins return every year, but her sailor 

 never comes with them, and never will till the sea 

 gives up her dead. 



Perhaps she loves the house-martins more than one 

 thinks for. Old friends they are to her. They have 

 built under her eaves as long as she can remember, and 

 who can tell what they have seen, as they winged 

 their flight above the ocean at the season of autumn 

 gales ? 



Dear little birds they certainly are, with their 

 twittering calls and their glossy coats of burnished 

 steel picked out with snowy white. 



Neither must we forget the more modest denizen 

 of our gardens. I mean the misnamed hedge-accentor. 

 He isn't a sparrow at all, yet " hedge-sparrow " he is 

 invariably styled. A quiet little brown bird who is 

 resident all the year through, with a bright melodious 

 song of no great compass, which he pours out when 

 winter days are mild and few rivals are about to drown 



