good fruiterers' only son; and her parents having died in her infancy, she had been reared with the tenderness which is usually bestowed on the only remaining scion of a virtuous and happy family in that rank of life. Her grand| father especially idolized her; made her the constant companion of his many walks to the garden on the side of Mount Pleasant, and installed her, before she was twelve years of age, leader of the fruit-pickers, and superintendent of the gardeners: offices in which she so conducted herself as to give equal satisfaction to the governors and the governed, the prince and the people. Never was vice-queen more popular, or more fortunate, both in her subjects and her territory. It would have been difficult to find a prettier piece of ground than this market-garden, with its steep slopes and romantic hollows, its groves of fruit-trees, its thickets of berrybushes, and its carpets of strawberries. Quite shut out from the town by the sudden and precipitous rise of the hill, it opened to a charming view of the Kennet, winding through green meadows, and formed, in itself, with its troop of active labourers, men, women, and girls, a scene of great animation; and during the time of the pearly pear-blossom, the snowy cherry, and the rosy apple-blossom, and, again, in the fruit season, (for, next to flowers, fruit is the prettiest of all things,) a scene of great beauty. There was one barberry-bush, standing by itself, on the top of a knoll of strawberries, which was really a picture. But by far the most beautiful part of that pleasant scene, was the young fruit-gatherer, Patty Hollis. Her complexion, a deep rich brown, with lips like the fruit of her favourite barberry-tree, and cheeks coloured like damask roses, suited her occupation. It had a sweet sunniness that might have beseemed a vintager, and harmonized excellently with the rich tints of the cherries and currants with which her baskets were so often over-brimmed. She had, too, the clear black eye, with its long lashes, and the dark and glossy hair, which give such brightness to a brown beauty. But the real charm of her countenance was its expression. The smiles, the dimples-the look of sweetness, of innocence, of perfect content, which had been delightful to look upon as a child, were still more delightful, because so much more rare, as she advanced towards womanhood. They seemed, and they were, the result of a character equally charming, frank, gentle, affectionate, and gay. When about seventeen, this youthful happiness, almost too bright to last, was overclouded by a great misfortune-the death of her kind grand father. Poor Patty's grateful heart was almost broken. She had lost one who had loved her better than he had loved any thing in the world, or all the world put together; and she felt (as every body does feel on such an occasion, though with far less cause than most of us,) that her own duty and affection had never been half what his fondness for her deserved,-that she had lost her truest and most partial friend, and that she should never be happy again. So deep was her affliction, that Mrs. Hollis, herself much grieved, was obliged to throw aside her own sorrow to comfort her. It was no comfort, but seemed rather an accession of pain, to find that she was what, considering her station, might be called an heiress,-that she would be entitled to some hundreds on her marriage or her coming of age, and that the bulk of the property (accumulated by honest industry and a watchful, but not mean, frugality) was secured to her after the death of her grandmother. The trustees to the property and executors of the will, who were also joined with Mrs. Hollis in the guardianship of her granddaughter, were our old friend Stephen Lane, his near neighbour and political ally, and another intimate acquaintance, who, although no politician, was a person of great and deserved influence with all those of his own rank who had come in contact with his acuteness and probity. Andrew Graham* was a Scotch gardener, and one of the very best specimens of a class which unites, in a remarkable degree, honesty, sobriety, shrewdness, and information. Andrew had superadded to his northern education, and an apprenticeship to a duke's gardener, the experience of eight years passed as foreman in one of the great nurseries near London: so that his idiom, if not his accent,t was almost entirely Anglicised; and when he came to Belford to superintend the garden and hothouses of a very kind and very intelligent gentleman, who preferred spending the The accent is not so easily got quit of. A trueborn Scot rarely loses that mark of his country, let him live ever so long on this side of the Tweed; and even a Southern sometimes finds it sooner learned than unlearned. A gardener of my acquaintance, the head man in a neighbouring nursery-ground, who spoke as good Scotch as heart could desire, and was universally known among the frequenters of the garden by the title of the "Scotchman," happened not only to have been born in Hertfordshire, but never to have travelled farther north than that coun ty. He had worked under a gardener from Aberdeen, and had picked up the dialect. Some people do catch peculiarities of tone. I myself once returned of Tynedale like a native, and, from love of "the from a visit to Northumberland, speaking the Doric north countrie," was really sorry when I lost the pretty imperfection. superfluities of a large income on horticultural pursuits, rather than in showier and less elegant ways, he brought into the town as long a head and as sound a heart as could be found in the country. To Mr. Hollis (who had himself begun life as a gentleman's gardener, and who thoroughly loved his art) his society was exceedingly welcome; and he judged, and judged rightly, that to no one could he more safely confide the important trust of advising and protecting two comparatively helpless females, than to the two friends whom he had chosen. Andrew vindicated his good opinion by advising Mrs. Hollis to resign the garden (which was held on lease of our other good friend, Mr. Howard,) dispose of the shop (which was her own,) take a small house in the suburbs, and live on her property; and he urged this the rather as he suspected her foreman of paying frequent visits to a certain beer-house, lately established in the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant, and bearing the insidious sign of "The Jolly Gardener;" and because, as he observed, "when an Englishman turned of fifty once takes to the national vice of tippling, you may as well look to raise pineapples from cabbage-stocks, as expect him to amend. He'll go to the Jolly Gardener, and the rest of the lads will follow him, and the garden may take care of itself. Part with the whole concern, my good lady, and ye are safe-keep it, and ye'll be cheated." Now this was good advice; and it had the usual fate of good advice, in being instantly and somewhat scornfully rejected. Mrs. Hollis had a high opinion of her foreman, and could not and would not live out of her shop; and as even Patty pleaded for the garden, though she intimated some suspicion of its manager, the whole concern remained in statu quo; and Andrew, when he saw the smiles return to her lips, and the bloom to her cheeks, and found how much her health and happiness depended on her spending her days in the open air, and in the employments she loved, ceased to regret that his counsel had not been followed, more especially as the head-man, having more than verified his prediction, had been discharged, and replaced, according to his recommendation, by a young and clever labourer in the garden. The calamity in question was no trifle. Poor Patty was unfortunate enough to be courted by Mr. Samuel Vicars, hair-dresser and perfumer, in Bristol-street; and, to add to the trial, the suitor was the especial favourite of her grandmother, and his addresses were supported by all her influence and authority. Mr. Samuel Vicars was one of those busybodies who are the pests of a country town. To be a gossip is perhaps permitted to the craft, as inheritors of those old privileged disseminators of news and scandal, the almost extinct race of barbers; but to be so tittle-tattling, so mischief-making, and so malicious as Mr. Samuel Vicars, is not allowed to any body; and the universal ill-will which such a style of conversation indicates is pretty certain to be returned in kind. Accordingly, the young gentleman had contrived to gather around himself as comfortable a mixture of contempt and hatred as one would desire to see on a summer's day. It was a little, pert, dapper personage, as slight and flimsy as his white apron or his linen jacket, with a face in which all that was not curl and whisker was simper and smirk, a sharp conceited voice, and a fluency, which as it might be accounted a main cause of the thousand and one scrapes into which he was perpetually getting, was almost as unlucky for himself as for his hearers. He buzzed about one like a gnat, all noise and sting and motion, and one wondered, as one does in the case of that impertinent insect, how any thing so insignificant could be so troublesome. Besides the innumerable private quarrels into which his genius for "evil-speaking, lying, and slandering," could not fail to bring him,-quarrels the less easily settled, because having a genuine love of litigation, an actual passion for the importance and excitement of a law-suit, he courted an action for damages, in which he could figure as defendant on the one hand, and blessed his stars for a horsewhipping, in which he shone as plaintiff, on the other; besides these private disputes, he engaged with the most fiery zeal and the fiercest activity in all the public squabbles of the place, and being unhappily, as Stephen Lane used to observe, of his party, and a partisan whom it was morally impossible to keep quiet, contrived to be a greater thorn in the Sooner than Patty had thought it possible, side of our worthy friend than all his oppoher cheerfulness came back to her; she half nents put together. Woe to the cause which lived at Mount Pleasant, did all she could to he advocated! The plainest case came out assist the new head-man, who, although mere- one mass of confusion from the curious infely a self-taught lad of the neighbourhood, did licity of his statements, and right seemed honour to Andrew's discrimination, and was wrong when seen through the misty medium beginning to discover (the god of love only of his astounding and confounding verbiage. knows how) that to be, in a small way, an Stephen's contempt for his adherent's orations heiress was no insupportable misfortune, when was pretty much such as a stanch old hound a vexation arising from that very cause almost might evince, when some young dog, the babmade her wish herself really the "wild wan- bler of the pack, begins to give tongue;dering gipsy" which her poor grandfather had" But, dang it," cried the good butcher, "he delighted to call her. brings the cause into contempt too! It's enough to make a man sell himself for a slave," added the poor patriot, in a paroxysm of weariness and indignation, “to hear that chap jabber for three hours about freedom. And the whole world can't stop him. If he would but rat now!" exclaimed the ex-butchAnd, doubtless, Samuel would have ratted, if any body would have made it worth his while; but the other party knew the value of such an opponent, and wisely left him in the ranks of opposition, to serve their cause by speaking against it; so Mr. Samuel Vicars continued a Reformer. er. Samuel's own affairs were exceedingly in want of a rich wife. What with running after la chose publique, and neglecting his own affairs, what with the friends that he lost and the enemies that he gained by the use of that mischievous weapon, his tongue-to say nothing of the many law-suits in which he was cast, and those scarcely less expensive that he won his concerns were in as much disorder as if he had been a lord. A hairdresser's is, at the best, a meagre business, especially in a country town, and his had declined so much, that his one apprentice, an idle lad of fourteen, and the three or four! painted figures, on which his female wigs were stuck in the windows, had the large showy shop, with its stock of glittering trumpery, pretty much to themselves; so that, Samuel began to pay most assiduous court, not to his fair intended,- for, pretty girl as Patty was, our Narcissus of the curlingirons was far too much enamoured of himself to dream of falling in love with a pair of cherry cheeks, but to her grandmother; and having picked up at the Jolly Gardener certain rumours of Mount Pleasant, which he related to his patroness with much of bitterness and exaggeration, awakened such a tem letter to Mr. Howard, giving him notice that in six months she should relinquish the garden, discharged her new foreman on the spot, and ordered Patty to prepare to marry the hairdresser without let or delay. Poor Patty! her only consolation was in her guardians. Her first thought was of Andrew, but he was sure to have the evil tidings from another quarter; besides, of him there could be no doubt; her only fear was of Stephen Lane. So, as soon as she could escape from the Padrona's scolding, and wipe the. tears from her own bright eyes, she set forth for the great shop in the Butts. It was this circumstance that first recommended him to the notice of Mrs. Hollis, who, herself a perfectly honest and true-hearted woman, took for granted that Samuel was veracious and single-minded as herself, believed all his puffs of his own speeches, and got nearer to thinking him, what he thought himself, a very clever fellow, than any other person whom he had ever honoured by his acquaintance. Besides the political sympathy, they had one grand tie in a common antipathy. A certain Mrs. Deborah Dean, long a green grocer in the Butts, and even then taking higher ground than Mrs. Hollis thought at all proper, had recently entered into partnership with a nursery-man, and had opened a mag-pest of wrath in her bosom, that she wrote a nificent store for seeds, plants, fruit, and vegetables, in Queen-street; and, although the increasing size of Belford, and the crowded population of the neighbourhood, were such as really demanded another shop, and that at the corner of the church-yard continued to have even more customers than its mistress could well manage, yet she had reigned too long over all the fruitage of the town to "bear a sister near the throne;" and she hated Mrs. Deborah (who, besides, was a "blue") with a hatred truly feminine-hot, angry, and abusive; and the offending party being, as it happened, a mild, civil, unoffending woman, poor Mrs. Hollis had had the misfortune to find nobody ready to join in speaking ill of her, until she encountered Samuel Vicars, who poured the whole force of his vituperative eloquence on the unfortunate dame. Now, Samuel, who had had some pecuniary dealings with her whilst she lived in his neighbourhood-certain barterings of cabbages, celery, carrots, and French beans, against combs and tooth-brushes, and a Parisian front, which had led first to a disputed account, and then to the catastrophe in which he most delighted, a law-suit, was charmed, on his side, to meet with what seldom came in his way, a sympathizing listener. He called every day to descant on the dear subject, and feed Mrs. Hollis's hatred with fresh accounts of her rival's insolence and prosperity; and, in the course of his daily visits, it occurred to him that she was well to do in the world, and that he could not do a better thing than to cast the eyes of affection on her pretty grand-daughter. "Well, my rosebud !" said the good butcher, kindly chucking his fair ward under the chia; "what's the news with you? Why, you are as great a stranger as strawberries at Christmas! I thought you had taken root at Mount Pleasant, and never meant to set foot in the town again." "Oh, Mr. Lane!"-began poor Patty, and then her courage failed her, and, she stopped suddenly and looked down abashed ;—" Oh! Mr. Lane!" "Well, what's the matter?" inquired her kind guardian; "are you going to be married, and come to ask my consent?" 66 Oh, Mr. Lane!" again sighed Patty. "Out with it, lass! never fear!" quoth Stephen. "Oh, Mr. Lane !" once more cried the damsel, stopping as if spell-bound, and blushing to her fingers' ends. "Well, Patty, if you can't speak to a friend that has dandled you in his arms, and your father before you, you'd best send the lad to see what he can say for himself. I shan't be cruel, I promise you. Though you might do better in the way of money, I would rather look to character. That's what tells in the long run, and I like the chap." “Oh, Mr. Lane, God forbid!" exclaimed Patty; "my grandmother wants me to marry Samuel Vicars!" "Sam Vicars! the woman's mad!" ejaculated Stephen. "She cannot be other than demented," observed Andrew, who had just entered the shop, "for she has discharged William Reid, the steadiest and cleverest lad that ever came about a garden, a lad who might be taken for a Scotchman,-and wants to marry Miss Patty to a loon of a hairdresser." "Whom any body would take for a Frenchman," interrupted the butcher; and having thus summed up the characters of the two rivals in a manner that did honour no less to their warm feelings than to their strong prejudices, the two guardians and their fair ward, ! much comforted by the turn the conversation had taken, began to consult as to their future proceedings. "She must give up the garden, since she has given notice," quoth Andrew; "but that won't much signify. This is only the beginning of January, but Christmas being passed, the notice will date only from Lady-day, so that she'll keep it till Michaelmas, and will have plenty of opportunity to miss William Reid's care and skill, and honesty-" "But poor William, what will become of him?" interposed his fair mistress: "William to be turned away at a day's warning, like a drunkard or a thief! What will he do?" "Just as a very industrious and very clever gardener always does. He'll prosper, depend upon it. And, besides, my dear, to tell ye a bit of a secret, your good friend Mr. Howard, who likes William so well, has given him an acre and a half of his cottage allotments, in capital order, and partly stocked, which happened to fall vacant just as it was wanted. And you must wait quictly, my bonny lass, and see what time will do for ye. William's three-and-twenty, and ye are nineteen,-ye have a long life before ye-wait and see what'll turn up. Mr. Howard is one of the best men in the world, although he has the ill-luck to be a tory," pursued Andrew, with a sly glance at Stephen. "Never a better, although he had the ill luck to be born on the south of the Tweed," responded Stephen, returning the glance. the colour and the dimples were returning under the reviving influence of hope. "Ay, get along home, rosebud," added the equally kind Englishman, chucking her under the chin, and giving her a fatherly kiss, " get along home, for fear they should miss you. And, as to being married to that whippersnapper with his curls and his whiskers, why, if I saw the slightest chance of such a thing, I'd take him up between my finger and thumb, and pitch him up to the top of St. Stephen's tower before you could say Jack Robinson! Get along, rosebud! I'll not see thee made unhappy, I promise thee." And, much consoled by these kind promises, poor Patty stole back to the little shop at the corner of the church-yard. The winter, the spring, and the summer, crept slowly by, bringing with them a gradual melioration of prospect to our nutbrown maid. Time, as Andrew had predicted, had done much to sicken Mrs. Hollis of the proposed alliance. Her honest and simple nature, and her real goodness of heart, soon revolted at his bitterness and malice, and enduring enmities. Her animosities, which vanished almost as she gave them utterance, had no sympathy with such eternity of hatred. Even her rival and competitor, Mrs. Dean, had been forgiven, as soon as she discovered that the world (even the little world of Belford) had room enough for both, and that, by adding the superior sorts of vegetables to her stock, with the very finest of which she was supplied through the medium of Andrew Graham, she had even increased the number of her customers and the value of her business, which, in spite of her having given notice of quitting the garden, (a measure which Patty suspected her of regretting,) she had determined to continue. She was weary, too, of his frivolity, his idleness, and his lies, and having taken upon her to lecture him on his several sins of gadding, tattling, meddle-making, and so forth, even intimating some distrust of his oratorical powers and his political importance, Mr. Samuel began to be nearly as tired of his patroness as his patroness was of him; so that, although no formal breach had taken place, Patty felt herself nearly rid of that annoyance. In the mean while, a new attraction, particularly interesting to the gardening world, had arisen in Belford, in the shape of a Horticultural Society. Nothing could be more beautiful than the monthly shows of prize flowers, fruits, and vegetables, in the splendid Town-hall. All the county attended them, and our country belles never showed to so much advantage as side by side by their rivals the flowers, giving themselves up with their whole hearts to a delighted admiration of the loveliest productions of Nature. Andrew Graham was of course one of the most successful competitors, and Mr. Howard one of the most zealous and intelligent patrons of the society, whilst even our friend Stephen took some concern in the matter, declaring that good cabbage was no bad accompaniment to good beef, and that all the wearers of blue aprons, whether butcher or gardener, had a claim to his affection-a classification at which Andrew, who had a high veneration for the dignity of his art, was not a little scandalized. Patty from the first had been an enthusiastic admirer of the whole plan, and Mrs. Hollis had been bribed into liking it, (for old people do not spontaneously take to novelties, especially in their own pursuits,) by the assurance of Andrew that the choice fruit and vegetables, the rare Carolina beans and green Indiancorn-the peas and strawberries so very early and so very late, so large of size and delicate of flavour-the lettuces and cauliflowers unmatched in whiteness and firmness, and a certain new melon which combined all the merits of all the melons hitherto known, came exclusively from one of the prize exhibitors of the horticultural meeting, and should be reserved exclusively for her, if she desired to purchase them. Farther Mrs. Hollis was too discreet to inquire. There are secrets in all trades, and none are more delicate than those regarding the supply of a great fruit-shop. She knew that they did not come from Andrew, for his character set suspicion at defiance; but all his friends might not be equally scrupulous. Silence was safest. So much had Patty been delighted with the prize-shows, all of which she attended, as was permitted to respectable trades-people in the afternoon when the gentry had returned home to dinner, that she had actually excited in Mrs. Hollis a desire to go with her, and at every meeting the expedition had been threatened, but had gone off, on the score of weather, or of illness, or of business-or, in short, any one of the many excuses which people who seldom go out make to themselves to avoid the exertion, so that the last day arrived and "Yarrow" was still unvisited." But that it was the last was a powerful plea with Patty, whose importunity, seconded by a bright sunshiny September evening, and by the gallantry of Mr. Lane, who arrived dressed in his best blue coat and red waistcoat on purpose to escort her, proved irresistible; and Mrs. Hollis, leaving the shop in charge of a trusty maid-servant, an alert shopboy, and a sedate and civil neighbour, (a sort of triple guardianship which she considered necessary to supply her own single presence,) gave to the inhabitants of Belford the great and unprecedented novelty of seeing her in the streets on a week-day. The people of Thibet would hardly be more astonished at the sight of the Dalai Lama. On reaching the Town-hall, she was struck even as much as she intended to be with the fragrance and beauty of the hothouse plants, the pines, grapes, peaches, and jars of flowers from the gardens of the gentlemen's seats in the neighbourhood, shown as they were with all the advantages of tasteful arrangement and the magical effect of the evening light. "What a many flowers have been invented since I was young!" was her natural thought, clothed in the very words in which it passed through her mind. She turned, however, from the long rows in which the contributions of the members had been piled, to some smaller tables at the top of the room, filled with the productions of cottage exhibitors. One of these standing a little apart was understood to be appropriated to an individual of this description, a halftaught labourer tilling his own spot of ground, who had never in his life worked in any thing beyond a common market-garden, but who had won almost every prize for which he had contended-had snatched the prizes not only from competitors of his own class, but from the gardeners of the nobility and gentry-had, in short, beaten every body, even Andrew Graham. To this table Mrs. Hollis turned with peculiar interest-an interest not diminished! when she beheld there piled with a picturesqueness that looked as if copied from Van Huysum; the identical green Indian-corn, Carolina beans, the lettuces and cauliflowers, the late peas and autumnal strawberries, and the newest and best of all possible melons, with which she had been so mysteriously supplied, flanked by two jars of incomparable dahlias, and backed by a large white rose, delicate and regular as the rose de Meaux, and two seedling geraniums of admirable beauty, | labelled The Mount Pleasant' and The Patty.' By the side of the table stood Andrew Graham, Mr. Howard, and William Reid. "The lad has beaten me, Mrs. Hollis, but I forgive him," quoth our friend Andrew, smiling; "I told ye that his wares were the best in the market." "And you must forgive me, Mrs. Hollis, for having made him your successor in the Mount Pleasant garden," said Mr. Howard. "I have been building a pretty cottage there for him and his wife, when he is fortunate enough to get one; and now that I see you do get out sometimes, if you would but come and see it-" "And if you would but let me give away the bride". added honest Stephen, seizing Patty's hand, while the tears ran down her cheeks like rain. "And if you would but let me manage the garden for you, Mrs. Hollis, and be as a son to you"-said William, pleadingly. And vanquished at once by natural feeling and professional taste-for the peas, melons, and strawberries, had taken possession of her very heart,-Mrs. Hollis yielded. In less than |