44 THE FLORIST. 
new orchard house at the Hall (poor Mr. Oldacres had only four, 
well stocked with fruit-bearing trees); and our King of Spades 
looked sternly (it was but for a moment) from his palace upon the 
modest vinery of Naboth. 
Now what do you think that the King’s daughter, at this crisis of 
our history, the Princess Mary of Oldacres, went and did? Exactly 
so ; for 1 know that you have guessed it ; she did, indeed. As you, my 
subtle reader, have well inferred, she did mot wear her second best 
bonnet, much less did she distort her very lovely face with unnecessary 
sniffs and sneers when she met the bearded knight, whom the king her 
father was disinclined to honour. The knight fell head over beard (his 
ears were planted out by extensive shrubberies, and so I vary the old 
expression that they may preserve their position of retirement) head 
over beard in love with the Princess, and “ Jill” Gf I may apply 
such a term to royalty) ‘‘ Jill came tumbling after.” When Mr. 
Chiswick got sixty-eight runs from his own bat in our annual match 
with the Slawmey Slashers (it is only fair towards our neighbours at 
Slawmey to remark that their best bowler was unable to attend, in 
consequence of a very pressing engagement at the treadmill of our 
county jail), and was carried from the wickets upon the shoulders of 
his rejoicing and victorious friends, I saw the bright colour rise on 
Mary’s cheek as vivid as the Poinsettia; and again, when in our con- 
test with the picked eleven from Moughboro’ some clumsy rufhan, 
shying in widely, hit our pet batsman on the head, and 
“ round he spun, and down he fell,” 
I saw poor Mary—indeed I went to tell her that. there was no serious 
hurt, having an earnest sympathy with lovers—vainly endeavouring to 
conceal her sore distress, and as white as Azalea candidissima !—And 
so it came to pass, on a moonlit January night, when, in spite of the 
Under-whip’s protestations, that ‘ he never could see the use of them 
Jrosses,” the Castle Lake had been covered with skaters and spectators ; 
it came to pass that Mr. Chiswick, after astonishing eyery one with his 
“eagles,” and figures, and ‘‘ outside edge,” and turning about and 
wheeling about upon his skates, as comfortably as the celebrated Mr. 
Crow without them, walked home with Mary Oldacres. And he told 
her, as they walked, his Winter’s Tale. He spoke of his loneliness in 
his cottage-home with so much bitter plaint, that you would imagine 
the Moated Grange of Mariana, or the Haunted House, so wondrously 
described by Hood, to have been quite festive residences, halls of 
dazzling light, and abodes of the fairies, when compared with his Den 
of Despair. He described in harrowing terms “ the fearful sense of 
desolation which oppressed him, and would, he knew, oppress him that 
very evening, when, alone and dolorous in his dreary cave,’ —(Oh fie, 
Mr. Chiswick, Mr. Chiswick! how can you thus defame your cozy 
parlour, with its cheerful fire and singing kettle? how can you thus 
ignore your horticultural books, your cornet-a-piston, upon which 1 
heard you playing but two nights ago, in your divine despair, the 
melancholy air of Hoop-de-dooden?) ‘“‘ where no sound was to be 
heard save the sorrowful sighing of the wind,” Che said nothing about 
