The broad alleys of the garden showed bright stores of all sorts of good old-fashioned flowers, well tended and kept.

Clumps of stately hollyhocks and scarlet peonies; roses of every hue, purple, blush, gold-color, and white, were showering down their leaves on the grassy turf; honeysuckles climbed and clambered over arbors; and great, stately tufts of virgin-white lilies exalted their majestic heads in saintly magnificence.

The garden was Miss Grace Seymour's delight and pride.

Every root in it was fragrant with the invisible blossoms of memory,--memories of the mother who loved and planted and watched them before her, and the grandmother who had cared for them before that.

The spirit of these charming old-fashioned gardens is the spirit of family love; and, if ever blessed souls from their better home feel drawn back to any thing on earth, we think it must be to their flower-garden.
Miss Grace had been up early, and now, with her garden hat on, and scissors in hand, was coming up the steps with her white apron full of roses, white lilies, meadow-sweets, and honeysuckle, for the parlor-vases, when the servant handed her a letter.
"From John," she said, "good fellow;" and then she laid it on the mantel-shelf of the parlor, while she busied herself in arranging her flowers.
[Illustration: "From John, good fellow."] "I must get these into water, or they will wilt," she said.
The large parlor was like many that you and I have seen in a certain respectable class of houses,--wide, cool, shady, and with a mellow _old_ tone to every thing in its furniture and belongings.