“It must be very interesting work, James, especially when you get to make them as beautifully as you do. What a lovely spray of roses and buds that is!”
“Do you think so, Miss Carry? Yes, they are very pretty. It is a copy of a bunch my friend the gardener brought me in last summer, and I liked it so much that I copied them just as they were. Will you accept that one, Miss Carry?” he said timidly; “I should be so glad if you would.”
“Oh, I could not think of it, James; it must have taken you an immense time.”
“My time is of no great value,” the lad said rather sadly; “besides, it does not take nearly as long as it looks. I cut all the petals out with stamps. Please take it, Miss Carry. It would give me so much pleasure if you would.”
“Well, if it would, James, I will certainly accept your offer, and thank you very much for them. They are really lovely. I have got a little Parian marble vase under a glass shade, father bought me my last birthday; they will keep under that beautifully.”
The lad took a sheet of silver paper from a drawer of the table, and watched her with a pleased face as she very carefully enveloped them in it.
“When I think how slowly the days used to pass,” he said, “I don’t know what I should have done without my flower making, I had nothing to do but to sit here, and hear the people walking past, and the children at play, and wonder why it should be that I was to be cut off from playing or walking as long as my life should last, and be a helpless burden upon other people all my life. I shall never forget what I felt, when your father said to me one day, ‘I wonder you don’t try and do something, James.’ Although I might have known that he was the last man to hurt any one’s feelings, Miss Carry, for a moment I did think that what he said was without thought. The tears came up into my eyes, and I said, I dare say bitterly enough, ‘God knows I should be only too glad, Mr. Walker, but what can I do?’
“‘Do,’ said your father, ‘plenty of things; make wax flowers, for instance.’
“‘Oh, I should be so glad, but how am I to learn?’
“‘I’ll tell you what, James,’ your father said. ‘I will get you a book to teach you all about it, and all the things you will want. You must get some flowers to copy—easy ones to begin with, and if you are sharp, you will find in a very short time you will be able to earn money, besides keeping yourself employed. I will lay out a pound, James, in the materials, and you shall pay it out of your first earnings.’ That’s three years back now, Miss Carry, and I was not much more than fourteen. But I had thought a good deal, through sitting here all day with nothing to do, but to think, think all the long hours, and I had read a great deal too, for Mr. Walker has always lent me what books I liked. But, boy as I was, my heart was too full of delight and hope to say one word. To think that I was not to be all my life without an occupation or an aim, that I was not always to be a burden to others! It was almost too much; for now for the first time your father’s words seem to point out that it might be so different to what I had thought. I have read in books, Miss Carry, of what a man condemned to death feels when he is reprieved upon the scaffold, but I am sure he could not feel more than I did. I had so often wished to die, and had thought it would be so much better for me, so much happier than my life could be, that it seemed as if more than fresh life was given me. Oh, how anxious I was till your father brought the things, how I learnt the book by heart before I ventured to begin, how nervous I was with my first attempt, and, above all, what joy I felt when mother took out a box of my flowers, and brought me back far more than I had ever dreamt they would have fetched, and the news that at the shop where she had sold them, they had said they would take as many more as I could make. I soon paid your father back his pound, Miss Carry; but as long as I live I can never repay him for the benefit he did me. What a different life mine has been since—always busy and happy, with a feeling that I am no longer a burden but a help to father and mother; and all this I owe to your father.”