Ah, but Eleanor, the Bot and the Hessian have more power over you than Mr. Edward Ormerod himself. Under the microscope you clearly perceive that these insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most emphatically, copulate. Escorted on the one side by the Bos or Warble, on the other by the Hessian Fly, Miss Ormerod advanced statelily, if slowly, into the open. Never did her features show more sublime than when lit up by the candour of her avowal. “This is excrement; these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative organs of the male. I’ve proved it.” Upon her head the hood of Edinburgh most fitly descended; pioneer of purity even more than of Paris Green. “If you’re sure I’m not in your way,” said Miss Lipscomb unstrapping her paint box and planting her tripod firmly in the path, “—I’ll try to get a picture of those lovely hydrangeas against the sky—What flowers you have in Penzance!” The market gardener crossed his hands on his hoe, slowly twined a piece of bass round his finger, looked at the sky, said something about the sun, also about the prevalence of lady artists, and then, with a nod of his head, observed sententiously that it was to a lady that he owed everything he had. “Ah?” said Miss Lipscomb, flattered, but already much occupied with her composition. “A lady with a queer-sounding name,” said Mr. Pascoe, “but that’s the lady I’ve called my little girl after—I don’t think there’s such another in Christendom.” Of course it was Miss Ormerod, equally of course Miss Lipscomb was the sister of Miss Ormerod’s family doctor; and so she did no sketching that morning, but left with a handsome bunch of grapes instead—for every flower had drooped, ruin had stared him in the face—he had written, not believing one bit what they told him—to the lady with the queer name, back there came a book “In-ju-ri-ous In-sects,” with the page turned down, perhaps by her very hand, also a letter which he kept at home under the clock, but he knew every word by heart, since it was due to what she said there that he wasn’t a ruined man—and the tears ran down his face and Miss Lipscomb, clearing a space on the lodging-house table, wrote the whole story to her brother. “The prejudice against Paris Green certainly seems to be dying down,” said Miss Ormerod when she read it.—“But now,” she sighed rather heavily, being no longer young and much afflicted with the gout, “now it’s the sparrows.” One might have thought that _they_ would have left her alone—innocent dirt-grey birds, taking more than their share of the breakfast crumbs, otherwise inoffensive. But once you look through a microscope—once you see the Hessian and the Bot as they really are—there’s no peace for an elderly lady pacing her terrace on a fine May morning. For example, why, when there are crumbs enough for all, do only the sparrows get them? Why not swallows or martins? Why—oh, here come the servants for prayers—