288 
POPULAR TALES OF FLOWERS 
desolating Dane, and beheld the flames which devoured 
the home of her childhood reddening in the evening sky? 
It might be that whilst she found a couch amongst the 
waving gold of the wild, surroundeed by her houseless 
attendants, and pillowed her beautiful head upon the 
Broom, she selected it as the emblem of Humility. And 
when she saw the waving Bluebells spring up on the very 
spot where the stormy sea-kings had encamped, where 
the tide of battle had raged, and swollen, and subsided, 
leaving no other trace of its course than the silent ridges 
which had been heaped up over the dead, she selected 
the blue-cupped flower as the true image of Constancy, 
which, though crushed, and bruised, and buried, forsaketh 
not the chosen spot where its beauty first bloomed. 
That when she sat mournful beside the moorland mere, 
wearied through carrying water to quench the thirst of the 
brave Saxons who had been wounded in battle, she saw 
the pale Water-Lilies sleeping upon their dark-green vel- 
vet leaves, spotless as the clear element upon which they 
floated, and leaving no vestige of the gross earth from 
which they sprang; and she thought how the heart of a 
woman, ennobled by virtuous deeds, might become so 
purified that, if looked into by the eye of an angel, he 
could not discover within either blot or blemish, nor aught 
that varied from his own divinity, but the fond humanity 
of love. 
Musing, she might conjure up some grey old Saxon 
abbey, nestling amid the silence of a green, sequestered 
valley, with its quiet graves, around which the Rosemary 
grew, hallowed the more in its remembrance through 
having been brought by holy men across the pathless sea ; 
and she might think that even as that plant put fortli 
its flowers in the dead midnight of winter, so through the 
deep clouds which hung over and darkened her native 
land, the morning of peace might yet break, and see many 
a battle-field again overgrown with flowers. 
It was in those days that Love and Constancy set out 
together to visit the world, and look for the abode of 
Happiness ; for there were rumours abroad that she had 
concealed herself somewhere in the earth, and they were 
fearful that Happiness had long pined for their socie^% 
and grown weary in waiting for their coming. Humility 
