That ponderous Mr. Grunderson, who plunged heavily down upon Maude’s central ottoman, a miraculous combination of upholstery and floriculture--that shining bald-headed Mr. Grunderson, who sat placidly grinning at the company, and addressed his hostess as “Mum”--had begun life as a market-gardener; and, had Mrs. Tredethlyn been born some twenty years earlier, would have been proud to supply her with azaleas and camellias for the decoration of the ottoman upon which he was now sitting. The march of progress, and the accompanying march of bricks and mortar, had driven before them the cabbages and strawberry-beds, the cucumber-frames and young plantations of evergreens, by the cultivation of which Mr. Grunderson and his forefathers had lived comfortably upon one-o’clock dinners of fat bacon and indigestible dumplings, with occasional varieties of butcher’s meat, thinking themselves passing rich when their ledgers showed a profit of two or three hundred pounds at the end of the year. The march of civilization, or rather the march of the myrmidons of that unreasoning despot, that implacable ruler, whom women call Fashion, always pushing westward, had contrived to push Mr. Grunderson’s gardens off the face of the earth, and in so doing had set a Pactolus flowing steadily into Mr. Grunderson’s pocket. The wealth poured in upon him with a rapidity which was like nothing but a fairy tale. That heroic Jack of the nursery story--who, by the bye, seems to have had no surname--never looked in more amazement on the bean-stalk that shot into the very skies in a single night, than did the honest market-gardener at the stuccoed district which had arisen, seven or eight stories and a campanello tower high, on the fields where he remembered execrating the slugs on dewy mornings a few years before. Where a prairie of bright red stocks had perfumed all the summer air with spicy odours, a square of stately mansions stared grimly at each other, and prime ministers’ carriages rolled with meteor lamps through the midnight darkness. Where ragged children, and gaunt sunburnt women, in blucher-boots and with indescribable bonnets balanced on their freckled noses, had weeded strawberry-beds for a pitiful sixpence a day, duchesses trailed their silken trains and wearied of the rolling hours after the approved manner of their kind in the pages of the poets and romancers. The transformation was as perfect as it had been rapid; and instead of the cabbages and cabbage-roses, the cucumber-frames and hothouse flowers of his youth and early manhood, Mr. Grunderson found himself, at fifty years of age, proprietor of ground-rents that made him a millionaire. He had only one child, a daughter, who had been educated for some fifty pounds a year at a seminary for young ladies, in which she had been cruelly snubbed on account of her father’s cabbages, and who was now determined to revenge herself on the companions of her blighted youth by the splendour of her womanhood.