To-day we shall, at least, meet them on equal terms.

We are all rather gapy at first, more especially Algy, who has deferred the making of the greater part of his toilet till his return, looks disheveled, and sounds grumbling.

But before long both gapes and grumbles depart.
Who would see the day when he is old, and stale, and shabby, when, like us, they could come out to meet him as he walks across the meadow with a mantle of dew wrapped round him, and a garland of paling rose-clouds, that an hour ago were crimson, about his head?
The place toward which we tend is at some little distance, and our road thither leads through all manner of comely rustic places, flowered fields, where the buttercups crowd their little varnished cups, and the vigilant ox-eyes are already wakefully staring up from among the grass-spears; a little wood; a deep and ruddy-colored lane, along whose unpruned hedges straggle the riches of the wild-rose, most delicately flushed, as if God in passing had called her very good, and she had reddened at his praise; where the honey-suckle, too, is holding stilly aloft the open cream-colored trumpets and closed red trumpet-buds of her heaven-sweet crown.
In an instant Tou Tou is scrawling and scrambling like a great spider up the steep bank: in an instant more she is tugging, tearing, devastating; while the faint petals that no mightiest king can restore, but that any infant with a touch can destroy, are showering in scented ruin around her.

It gives me a pain to see it, as if I saw some sentient thing in agony.

I think I feel, with Walter Savage Landor-- "I never pluck the rose; the violet's head Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank And not reproached me: the ever-sacred cup Of the pure lily hath between my hands Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold." "You will have your basket filled before we get there," I say, remonstrating, but she does not heed me.
Hot and scratched--at least I am glad that in their death-pain they were able to scratch her--she still tugs and mauls.