"According to Wordsworth, the flower in the crannied wall and the strawberry teach the same lesson, for does he not say:—
That life is love and immortality.
Life, I repeat, is energy of love,
Divine or human, exercised in pain,
In strife and tribulation, and ordained,
If so approved and sanctified, to pass
Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy?
At any rate, that is what he puts into his Parson's lips.
"Farquhar, my boy, I think we'd better stop, for I'm weakening fast. It's sentimental the flowers and the fruit are making me. I mind, when I was a little fellow in the old sod, my mother gathering wild flowers from the hedges and putting them all round the ribbon of my straw hat. I can't pay her the debt of that mark of love the same way, but I feel I should pay it to somebody. You never told me about your mother."
"No, because she is dead and gone long ago, and my father married again, and brought a vixen, with two trollops of girls, to take the place of an angel. These three women turned my stomach at all the sex. Look, there's a pretty woman for you!"