Oliver could not be guilty of the liberty Jack Dadd took in possessing himself of a girl’s hat and veil, sticking it on his own head and proving what a vagabond-looking young woman he would have made, as he rushed here and there, through the wood, pursued by the owner of the hat. When another girl ventured to pull out a glove which had been dangling from Oliver’s pocket, he suffered her to keep it, possibly more to her surprise than her satisfaction. It was pure child’s play, but Oliver had grown too old and modest in his civilisation to be able for child’s play, at which both players and lookers on, to his discomfiture, ‘laughed consumedly.’ Poor Oliver! his was an anxious and thankless office which he had assumed at his own charges, and Fan’s earnestness, threatening to become a family quality, infected him in its discharge. Harry Stanhope, who was no reformer, would have impartially scattered merry-thoughts and posies, purloined girls’ attire and pranked himself in it, when he saw it was the humour of his neighbours, without a scruple and with considerable diversion to himself in the process. To cover his shy withdrawal Oliver was betrayed into committing his cardinal mistake at the picnic. He stumbled unconsciously into what all those present regarded as Fan’s track. There were two plain retiring elderly women of the party whom the majority of its members reckoned decidedly beneath their rank. But the Miss Barrs were respectably connected, they had always been at the excursion, and they were undoubtedly proprietresses of a green-grocer’s shop, not merely grey-headed shop girls. Oliver was first attracted to them by their comparative isolation in the crowd, and then by the circumstance that one of the sisters was quietly searching for, and gathering, a nosegay of such aromatic wild flowers as summer spares, not merely picking a few at random and dropping them carelessly the next moment, while she was far past the age of coquettishly disposing of the last stray rose, or plume of the queen of the meadow, in the demure bonnet which she wore instead of a smart hat. Oliver was reminded of his baker who had the sneaking kindness for butterflies. He actually introduced himself to Miss Nancy Barr, and it compensated for a good deal which had jarred upon him in the course of the day, when he made the agreeable discovery that Miss Nancy really had considerable knowledge of wild flowers and a genuine regard for them. She had once lived with an uncle who had been a schoolmaster endowed with a love of nature and botany, she was tolerably well acquainted not only with the general appearance and properties of plants, but with old superstitions and lingering traditional virtues attached to them. She was a fairly intelligent woman, especially on this subject, which was akin to her walk in trade, and when Oliver made use of the old poet’s words, ‘These flowers white and red Such that men callen Daisies in our town,’