"Don't laugh," he said, very seriously. "Only an artist would laugh at me, not you who love Nature. There lives a great painter, Joan, who paints pictures that nobody else in the wide world can paint. He is growing old, but he is not too old to take trouble still. Once, when he was a young man, he drew a lemon-tree far away in Italy. It was only a little lemon-tree, but the artist rose morning after morning and drew it leaf by leaf, twig by twig, until every leaf and bud and lemon and bough had appeared. It was not labored and false; it was grand because it was true: a joy forever; work Old Masters had loved; full of distinction and power and patience almost Oriental. A thing, Joan Tregenza, worth a wilderness of 'harmonies' and 'impressions,' 'nocturnes' and 'notes,' smudges and audacities. But I suppose that is all gibberish to you?" "Iss, so it be," she admitted. "Learn to love everything that is beautiful, my good child. But I think you do, unconsciously perhaps." "I don't take much 'count of things." "Yes, unconsciously. You have a cowslip there stuck in your frock, though where you got it from I can't imagine. The flower is a month too early." "Iss, 'tis, I found en in a lew, sunshiny plaace. Us have got a frame for growin' things under glass, an' it had bin put down 'pon top this cowslip an' drawed 'en up." "Will you give it to me?" She did so, and he smelled it. "D'you know that the green of the cowslip is the most beautiful green in all Nature, Joan? Here, I have a flower, too; we will exchange if you like." He took a scrap of blackthorn bloom from his coat and held it out to her, but she shrank backward and he learned something. "Please not that--truly 'tis the dreadfulest wicked flower. Doan't 'e arsk I to take en." "Unlucky?" "Iss fay! Him or her as first brings blackthorn in the house dies afore it blows again. Truth--solemn--us all knaws it down in these paarts. 'Tis a bewitched thing--a wicked plant, an' you can see it grawin' all humpetty-backed an' bent an' crooked. Wance, when a man killed hisself, they did use to bury en wheer roads met an' put a blackthorn stake through en; an' it all us grawed arter; an' that's the worstest sort o' all." "Dear, dear, I'm glad you told me, Joan; I will not wear it, nor shall you," he said, and flung it down and stamped on it very seriously. The girl was gratified. "I judge you'm a furriner, else you'd knawn 'bout the wickedness o' blackthorn." "I am. Thank you very much. But for you I should have gone home wearing it. That puts me in your debt, Joan." "'Tain't nothin', awnly there's a many coorious Carnish things like that. An' coorious customs what some doan't hold with an' some does."