"If love's gardener sweet were I,
I would cull the stars for thy pleasure."
"Say, tall and reverend sir, can you reach a star? Look how they twinkle!"
The Young Man is so very English I half feared he would not understand how to take her, but Mamie's freedom was infectious.
"All the stars are not up there," he said, "fortunately for my arms. They are twinkling under these trees to-night."
"Why, you are poetical! But these lively stars of white and blue are not the kind to cull, are they, Mistress Mary? Land's sake! but they might prove as big an undertaking as one of those fiery worlds twinkling up there. 'How I wonder what you are!' Why, we don't wonder, we know. I learnt all about them at school. But who knows what I am composed of?"
"'Ribbons and laces and sweet pretty faces!' is what they taught me at my school," said the Young Man, calmly.
"Really, the nightingale can't sing if we all talk so much. Do let us try and be quiet for two minutes," I said.
But Mamie was walking away laughing, and saying the nightingale would soon get used to her dulcet tones, and the Young Man stayed listening with me.
"And yet it's true," he said, "what she says; how is one ever to know about another person, particularly when that other person always turns the conversation when one begins to talk about—"
"You are getting mixed," I interrupted. "Don't you like talking about my garden?"