It was accompanied with patterns of yellow paper sleeves, trimmed in every colour, an old book of fashions, and beautiful and bright, as if reared in wood or meadow, a pot of yellow crocuses in bloom. They were closing now, for evening was drawing in, and they knew the hour. They had opened to light in the dingy parlour within, and which we will now enter. It was but a little room, and the soft gloom of a spring twilight half-filled it. The furniture though poor and old-fashioned, was scrupulously clean; and it shone again in the flickering fire-light. A few discoloured prints in black frames hung against the walls; two or three broken china ornaments adorned the wooden mantel-shelf, which was, moreover, decorated with a little dark-looking mirror in a rim of tarnished gold. By the fire an elderly woman of grave and stern aspect, but who had once been handsome, sat reading the newspaper. Near the window, two apprentices sewed, under the superintendence of Rachel Gray. A mild ray of light fell on her pale face, and bending figure. She sewed on, serious and still, and the calm gravity of her aspect harmonized with the silence of the little parlour which nothing disturbed, save the ticking of an old clock behind the door, the occasional rustling of Mrs. Gray's newspaper, and the continuous and monotonous sound of stitching. Rachel Gray looked upwards of thirty, yet she was younger by some years. She was a tall, thin, and awkward woman, sallow and faded before her time. She was not, and had never been handsome, yet there was a patient seriousness in the lines of her face, which, when it caught the eye, arrested it at once, and kept it long. Her brow, too, was broad and intellectual; her eyes were very fine, though their look was dreamy and abstracted; and her smile, when she did smile, which was not often, for she was slightly deaf and spoke little, was pleasant and very sweet. She sewed on, as we have said, abstracted and serious, when gradually, for even in observation she was slow, the yellow crocuses attracted her attention. She looked at them meditatively, and watched them closing, with the decline of day. And, at length, as if she had not understood, until then, what was going on before her, she smiled and admiringly exclaimed: "Now do look at the creatures, mother!" Mrs. Gray glanced up from her newspaper, and snuffed rather disdainfully. "Lawk, Rachel!" she said, "you don't mean to call crocuses creatures--do you? I'll tell you what though," she added, with a doleful shake of the head, "I don't know what Her Majesty thinks; but I say the country can't stand it much longer." Mrs. Gray had been cook in a Prime Minister's household, and this had naturally given her a political turn. "The Lord has taught you," murmured Rachel, bending over the flowers with something like awe, and a glow spread over her sallow cheek, and there came a light to her large brown eyes.