"Well," she said, "I hope the others will take pattern from it and do as well."
"So," said Madame Boll, after they were gone, "that accounts for my being left here: I must confess I was a little mortified, for I thought it was a slight; but I generally find, if we wait awhile, everything comes right in the end, and possibly my being here has done you some good, or given you comfort; and if so, instead of regret, I ought to feel pleasure. But now, my young friends, I will tell you a conversation I overheard one day, between the young lady who was here just now and another, which your foolish behavior a short time ago brought to my mind. They were talking about the children in the school, and how difficult it was to make them feel the advantage of being submissive and conforming to their rules. They said they were so anxious to have their own way, and seemed to think it was a pleasure to their teachers to thwart them, or make them do what they did not wish, and not that it was intended for their good; and if their teachers thought they paid too much attention to their dress, [{854}] and wished to be smart, and wear flowers and feathers, when they ought rather to be adorning their minds, and beautifying their tempers, and enriching their understanding, they were ready to cry out, as you did just now, 'What tyranny!' 'How interfering!' 'Why can't they let us dress as we like?' But what they were particularly complaining about on that occasion, was that the children would persist in wearing hoops which stuck out their clothes, and made them take up twice as much room as they otherwise would have done. For, it seems, the benches where they sat were only large enough for them if they sat close together, which they could not do with hoops on, so they were obliged to tell them they could not take them into the school if they did not lay aside their hoops, and some of them were foolish enough to say that they would not come to school if they were not allowed to wear hoops. Now, it struck me, this was just like your folly in wishing to keep your wild-growing suckers and lower branches, when you know very well that they would take away all the nourishment which is needed to bring the beautiful rose-buds to perfection; the bud, in your place, answering to the knowledge and other excellences which it is the object of education to impart to their ignorant and lawless natures, and which, in after years, when they are able to appreciate them, they prize highly, and can hardly understand what it was that made them so averse to go through the process necessary for their acquirement."
A year or two afterward I saw the young lady and the gardener looking at a bed of beautiful roses on the lawn, and heard the young lady ask what had become of the Devoniensis she had asked him to bud.
"Don't you see it, ma'am," he said, "growing against the wall? I think it is almost the gem of the whole garden."
"Oh, what a beauty!" she exclaimed; "and how well it has grown!"
"Yes, ma'am," he said; "it has always done well; it seemed to take to it kindly from the very first, and has never gone back at all. But I had a good deal of trouble with this one; perhaps you may remember my saying I thought it likely I should. It is that strong growing one you remarked at the same time when you told me to bud the Devoniensis. It won't make much show this year. It wasted so much energy in putting out side-shoots and suckers. But I think it has got out of its bad ways, and next year I hope it will make quite a grand tree."
"Oh!" she said, "and here is my old friend Madame Boll, I see. I am glad you put it here, it is well worth a good place."
"You hear," said Madame Boll, after they were gone, to her neighbor Gloire de Dijon, "what they say of us, and I hope you have become reconciled to the change, and will let the good that is in you show itself."
Whereupon there seemed to come rather a lachrymose murmur from the dwarfed shoot of Gloire de Dijon. "But am I not to flower at all this year?"
"Well, my dear," said Madame Boll, tenderly, "I do not wish to be severe or say anything to hurt your feelings, but you must know that your present disappointment is the natural result of your past conduct. You were so determined to indulge in perverse and self-willed suckers, and you never let the gardener touch you without trying to prick his fingers or tear his clothes. And now all you want is a little patience. Who knows but you may be allowed to bloom in the autumn, and perhaps win the prize at the last flower show? But if not, why it will be all right next year. Do you think it was no mortification to me to be neglected and almost unnoticed last year, and that, as it appears, entirely owing to the carelessness of others, and not from any fault of mine? Well, you see, I have got over it; and very likely next year [{855}] you will have the gratification of hearing the lady praise you as she did me just now. Be thankful that experience with you has not come too late."