"Lady Teazle?" asked Hildegarde, laughing.
"A different branch!" replied Rose, "but just as prickly. The fuller's teasel,—do you know about it, dear?"
"No, Miss Encyclopædia, I do not!" replied Hildegarde, with some asperity. "You know I never know anything of that kind; tell me about it!"
"Well, it is very curious," said Rose, taking the great bunch of mourning-bride that her friend handed her, and separating the flowers daintily. "The flower-heads of this teasel, when they are dried, are covered with sharp curved hooks, and are used to raise the nap on woollen cloth. No machine or instrument that can be invented does it half so well as this dead and withered blossom. Isn't that interesting?"
"Very!" said Hildegarde. "Oh, dear! oh, dear!"
"What is the matter?" cried Rose, in alarm. "Has something stung you? Let me—"
"Oh, no!" said Hildegarde, quickly. "I was only thinking of the appalling number of things there are to know. They overwhelm me! They bury me! A mountain weighs me down, and on its top grows a—a teasel. Why, I never heard of the thing! I am not sure that I am clear what a fuller is, except that his earth is advertised in the Pears' soap-boxes."
They both laughed at this, and then Hildegarde bent with renewed energy over a bed of feathered pinks of all shades of crimson and rose-color.
"A mountain!" said Rose, slowly and thoughtfully, as she laid the blossoms together and tied them up in small posies. "Yes, Hilda, so it is! but a mountain to climb, not to be buried under. To think that we can go on climbing, learning, all our lives, and always with higher and higher peaks above us, soaring up and up,—oh, it is glorious! What might be the matter with you to-day, my lamb?" she added; for Hildegarde groaned, and plunged her face into a great white lily, withdrawing it to show a nose powdered with virgin gold. "Does your head ache?"
"I think the sturgeon is at the bottom of it," was the reply. "I have not yet recovered fully from the humiliation of having been so frightened by a sturgeon, when I had been brought up, so to speak, on the 'Culprit Fay.' I have eaten caviare too," she added gloomily,—"odious stuff!"