"Put on your hood and cloak, little lady," she said, "and run into the garden to see if you cannot find some roses for your cousin. Betty tells me there has been so little frost this season that the rose-bushes are still all in leaf."
I scampered off willingly, and did not show myself in the house again until the sun almost touched the tree-tops. I gathered chrysanthemums and nasturtiums and late heartsease, and at least a dozen roses and buds, and, wandering farther and farther down the quiet paths, I saw what I had never noticed before—that there was a small graveyard at the back of the garden, of which it formed a part. An arbor, thickly curtained with a Florida honeysuckle that kept its leaves all winter, was at one side of the burial-place; a walk, edged with box, stretched from it straight up to the house-yard. Now that the trees were bare, I saw that old Madam Leigh could have a full view, through the windows in the south gable, of the arbor, and the two white headstones before it:—
JOHN AND RUTH LEIGH.
TWIN-CHILDREN OF EDWARD AND JUDITH LEIGH.
BORN SEPTEMBER 3, 1790.
DIED AUGUST 1, 1810.
"I was dumb; I opened not my mouth, because THOU didst it."
I sat down in the summer-house and had a long thinking spell, all by myself. Too young to word the emotions that swelled my heart, the thoughts that oppressed my brain, there was, all the while, in heart and head, the recollection of the story she had told of her manner of getting the first pair of humming-birds—and how she had stolen softly around to the window after dark, and shut the parents in with their nestlings.
I never saw her again. On Christmas morning the maid, who came as usual to awake and dress her mistress, found that she had died in her sleep.
Chapter XVII
Out into the World
