If thou hast read all this Book, and art never the better, yet catch this flower before thou go out of the garden, and peradventure the scent thereof will bring thee back to smell the rest. HENRY SMITH. Deborah found no one in Doncaster to supply the place of Betsy Allison in the daily intercourse of familiar and perfect friendship. That indeed was impossible; no after-math has the fragrance and the sweetness of the first crop. But why do I call her Deborah? She had never been known by that name to her new neighbours; and to her very Father she was now spoken of as Mrs. Dove. Even the Allisons called her so in courteous and customary usage, but not without a melancholy reflection that when Deborah Bacon became Mrs. Dove, she was in a great measure lost to them. “Friendship, although it cease not In marriage, is yet at less command Than when a single freedom can dispose it.”[1] [Footnote 1: FORD.] Doncaster has less of the _Rus in Urbe_ now than it had in those days, and than Bath had when those words were placed over the door of a Lodging House, on the North Parade. And the house to which the Doctor brought home his bride, had less of it than when Peter Hopkins set up the gilt pestle and mortar there as the cognizance of his vocation. It had no longer that air of quiet respectability which belongs to such a dwelling in the best street of a small country town. The Mansion House by which it was dwarfed and inconvenienced in many ways, occasioned a stir and bustle about it, unlike the cheerful business of a market day. The back windows, however, still looked to the fields, and there was still a garden. But neither fields nor garden could prevail over the odour of the shop, in which, like hot, cold, moist and dry, four champions fierce, in Milton's Chaos, rhubarb and peppermint, and valerian, and assafetida, “strove for mastery” and to battle brought their atoms. Happy was the day when peppermint predominated; though it always reminded Mrs. Dove of Thaxted Grange, and the delight with which she used to assist Miss Allison in her distillations. There is an Arabian proverb which says, “the remembrance of youth is a sigh;” Southey has taken it for the text of one of those juvenile poems in which he dwells with thoughtful forefeeling upon the condition of declining life.