The dinner-table that had caused me so much anxiety was specially needed for an American friend of one of the Others. She greeted the pretty effect with, "My! how cunning! Do all these pretty things grow in your garden, Mistress Mary?"
"In mine and Nature's," I added.
"You have a little rhyme about Mary and her garden, haven't you? And her lamb, too. Have you a lamb?"
"Oh, yes," said one of the Others, "she has a lamb, the new version of that rhyme, too, 'with coat as black as soot.'"
But what she meant, or why I grew hot, it passes my wisdom to say.
"Say now, do you grow nightingales in your garden, Mistress Mary? I assure you, sir," turning to his Reverence, "I have never yet compassed an introduction to that much-vaunted British institooshon, the nightingale. I am just crazy till I hear those liquid tones, the jug jug and jar jar: such vurry ugly equivalents they sound to me for thrilling notes, but the best, I conclude, our poor speech can do in imitation of that divine melody."
When our friend had quite finished—I noticed she landed herself without fear in the longest of sentences, and brought them always with much aplomb to the neatest of conclusions, an accomplishment in which she must find the majority of her English cousins sadly deficient—his Reverence promised her the wished-for concert; and he further dilated on the beauties represented by jug jug and jar jar, until she assured him that with him for her guide she would face that dark and lonely walk of Mistress Mary's—she meant my lime trees—where doubtless she would find a blue or white lady flitting past, with a sigh, wasn't it? for some recalcitrant lover.
However, I noticed she walked off later with the Young Man, who dropped in after dinner, and she asked him all about the jug jug and jar jar with ever-increasing animation.
It certainly was very cool that night, as it can be in June even after a hot day. We looked round to send Jim for shawls, but Jim had vanished, to his work, no doubt. We strolled down the lime walk to see if the nightingales would oblige us, which I doubted, as nightingales are as careful of their throats in a cool wind as are prima donnas.