Boxes, upturned flour barrels, corners of china-shelves and window-sills, showed bowers of luxuriant leaf and blossom.

Her calla lilies had long been famous in the county; they had taken first prizes at innumerable fairs, and whenever there was a wedding or a funeral in the neighbourhood, the tall green stalks were clipped bare of bloom.

Many were the dead hands that had been laid in the earth clasping her lilies.

This thought had been for years the chief solace in her life, and she was accustomed to refer to it in the heat of religious debates, as though it offered infallible proof of her contention.

After calla lilies, fuchias and tuberoses did best in her hands, and she had nursed rare night blooming cereus for seven years in the hope that it would arrive at perfection the following June.