Below the balcony was a square garden-plot, shut in with a brick wall, and kept very neat and trim.

There were hollyhocks round the walls, and many-coloured poppies, with many other shrubs and flowers.

My eyes fell on one especially, a tall red-blossomed rushy kind of flower, that I had never seen before; and that seemed indeed to be something out of the common, for it stood in the middle of a little earth-plot, and had the whole bed nearly to itself.
I was looking at this flower, not thinking of it, but wondering all the while whether Mr.Aldobrand would say the diamond was worth ten thousand pounds, or fifty, or a hundred thousand, when I heard him speaking, and turned round quick.

'My sons, and you especially, son John,' he said, and turned to me: 'this stone that you have brought me is no stone at all, but glass--or rather paste, for so we call it.

Not but what it is good paste, and perhaps the best that I have seen, and so I had to try it to make sure.