26 
THE FLORIST. 
condescended to marry. Of course, if Cupid had not been blindfold, he 
would no more have thought of taking aim at him than a schoolboy of 
shooting his. favorite arrow against the wall of a fives-court, and how 
that promiscuous young archer made his dart to stick in the ducal 
granite must remain for ever among the “things not generally known.” 
Never since Eve had the world seen such a proof of Love’s omnipotence, 
as when he sent our grim Lord a-courting. No weaker influence 
ever could have taught that cold pale face to smile, to smile and to beam 
with a happy brightness, as the snow sparkles in the sun. But how he 
ever remembered her name, or brought himself to proffer those little 
tendernesses, which are usual upon these occasions, those touches of 
nature which make the whole world kin, is to me a complete perplexity, 
an unreality as astonishing as though I were to see the ghost of Hamlet’s 
father with his arm round the waist of Jessica. 
Poor Jessica! she came to us as joyous as a thrush in summer, and 
she sang awhile blithely and sweetly in the tomb of Hamlet’s father. 
But when he resumed, as he shortly did, his old sepulchral ways, a 
chill struck the heart of our singing-bird, and all her mirthful music 
was changed into a plaint and wail. She had come from a home 
of love and cheerfulness, and she drooped in his x\rctic atmosphere, as 
an Orchid would droop in an ice-house. 
“ For a trouble weighed upon her, 
And perplexed her night and morn, 
With the burden of an honour, 
Unto which she was not born.” 
Six years after her marriage-day, they bore her slowly through the 
dark avenue of Cedars, and the chaplain came in his white surplice to 
welcome her with words of hope and peace. 
Three children were born to them. The Marquis, who soon showed 
himself to be a true “ chip of the old (ice) block,” and a ghostling of 
amazing promise ; Lord Evelyn and the Lady Alice, who, happily for 
us all, resembled their mother. Never were two brothers so unlike 
each other. I doubt whether the elder ever broke out of a walk or into 
a laugh in his life, whereas the younger would be scampering all over 
the place, with his little sister breathless behind, and his merry voice 
making our hearts glad. Now they were in the conservatory, changing 
the tallies, and sticking the fallen flowers of the Camellia upon the 
Euphorbia’s thorns ; now turning out a lot of sparrows, which they had 
caught in traps, and adorned with appendages of brilliant worsted, red, 
green, and yellow, in the immediate neighbourhood of the aviary, and 
so essaying to impose upon us the idea of a general escape and dispersion 
of all our feathered curiosities; and now “drawing ” the shrubberies, 
with Lord Evelyn at one end as a master of foxhounds (the foxhounds 
by an Irish retriever), and Lady Alice at the other as an under-whip, 
waiting, watchful and silent, for the fox to break, which he generally did 
in the guise of a blackbird ; and then announcing his exit with the 
promptest and shrillest of “ tally-hos.” Our Marquis the while was 
indoors at his books, having, it was reported, a precocious relish for 
algebra, and an insight into the science of political economy not often to 
be found (thank Heaven) in young gentlemen of fourteen. 
