THE SIX OF SPADES. 99 



wild roses, lighting up the land with their pure 

 starlike glory, and beautifying the gloom of a fallen 

 world ; wild roses, on which Adam looks, as he toils 

 with the sweat on his brow, and yearns at heart for 

 Eden. It is the time of roses ; we pluck them as we 

 pass, and make a coronal, nurse and I, for my little 

 sister's hair. I see her now, enthroned upon some 

 southward bank, where the oxlip and the violet have 

 watched in their season the slumbers of the fairy 

 queen, smiling through her tears, herself a dewy 

 rosebud ; for the brier has pierced her small tender 

 hand, and her spirit has been startled, and has 

 quailed awhile, at the presence and the prescience of 

 pain. Only a moment, for the breeze which gently 

 stirs those golden tendrils, and bears away a crown 

 jewel in that petal which flutters to the ground, is 

 fraught with sweet scents and sounds, with frank- 

 incense rising heavenward, and psalms from a 

 thankful choir ; and all things young and innocent 

 must needs rejoice. Dear days of sacred gladness, 

 fair hours of guileless love ! I never see the wild rose 

 now, but I hear sweet whispers of their " tender 

 grace," and I am wandering once more through 

 the bowery lanes, with my little sister's hand in 

 mine. 



And next I remember those roses of the garden, 

 which, few and precious, were the delight of my 

 early boyhood ; the glorious Provence (that elegant 

 individual who first called this blushing beauty " Old 

 Cabbage," ought to have been imprisoned for treason 

 against the Queen of Flowers, and his diet restricted 

 scrupulously to the humble esculent in question), 



