Dogs -- Fiction; Poor families -- Fiction; Short stories
"For me,"--she stooped, and, looking round,
Plucked a blue harebell from the ground,--
"For me, whose memory scarce conveys
An image of more splendid days,
This little flower, that loves the lea,
May well my simple emblem be;
It drinks heaven's dew as blithe as rose
That in the King's own garden grows,
And when I place it in my hair,
Allan, a bard, is bound to swear
He ne'er saw coronet so fair."
Still greater was the delight with which another
American recognised that blossom of a thousand
associations--the flower sacred to Milton and Shakspeare--the
English primrose. He bent his knee to the ground in
gathering a bunch, with a reverential expression which I
shall not easily forget, as if the flower were to him an
embodiment of the great poets by whom it has been
consecrated to fame; and he also had the good taste not to
be ashamed of his own enthusiasm. I have had the pleasure of
exporting, this spring, to my friend Miss Sedgwick, (to
whose family one of my visiters belongs,) roots and seeds of
these wild flowers, of the common violet, the cowslip, and
the ivy, another of our indigenous plants which our
Transatlantic brethren want, and with which Mr. Theodore
Sedgwick was especially delighted. It will be a real
distinction to be the introductress of these plants into
that _Berkshire_ village of New England, where Miss
Sedgwick, surrounded by relatives worthy of her in talent
and in character, passes her summers.
It was a small clear lake almost embosomed in trees, across which an
embankment, formed for the purpose of a decoy for the wildfowl with
which it abounded, led into a wood which covered the opposite hill; an
old forest-like wood, where the noble oaks, whose boughs almost dipped
into the water, were surrounded by their sylvan accompaniments of birch,
and holly, and hawthorn, where the tall trees met over the straggling
paths, and waved across the grassy dells and turfy brakes with which it
was interspersed. One low-browed cottage stood in a little meadow--it
might almost be called a little orchard--just at the bottom of the
winding road that led to the Great Pond: the cottage of the widow King.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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