“Please ma’am, will ye gimme a bowkay?”
“Dear me!” Olivia laughed, “how things do sprout in a garden! Did you come right up out of the ground?”
“Plase, ma’am, a bowkay! Me mudder’s sick an’ me fader’s goned away.”
The speaker, a boy of five, stood holding by the hand something in the way of a sister, about two sizes smaller. At Olivia’s little joke, which they did not in the least understand, they had both grinned sympathetically, showing rows of diminutive teeth as white and even as snow-berries.
“Bless your little hearts, of course you shall have a bouquet! Come and choose one,”—and taking a hand of each Olivia led them slowly along the brilliant borders.
They were a bit shy at first, but they soon picked up their courage, and Patsy fell to accumulating a mass of incongruous blossoms whose colours fought each other tooth and nail. Little Biddy, more modest, as beseemed her inferior rank in 229 the scale of being, fixed her heart upon a single flame-flower which absolutely refused to reconcile itself with the ingenuous pink of her calico frock.
“How long has your mother been ill?” Olivia asked of the boy, who by this time was quite hidden behind a perfect forest of asters and larkspur and lobelia cardinalis.
“Me mudder’s always sick. She coughs an’ coughs, and den she lays on de bed long whiles.”