"Mother Carey! Oh, mother! mammie, dear! come and see!"

"Come--where?"

"To fairy-land. Get her bonnet, Babie."

"Out of doors, you boy? just look there!"

"Oh! bother all that! It can wait."

"Do pray come, mother," entreated Armine; "you never saw anything like it!"

"What is it? Will it take long?" said she, beginning to yield, as Babie danced about with her bonnet, Armine tugged at her, and Allen look half-commanding, half-coaxing.

"She is not to know till she sees! No, don't tell her," said Armine.

"Bandage her eyes, Allen. Here's my silk handkerchief."

"And Janet. She mustn't see," cried Babie, in ecstasy.

"I'm not coming," said Janet, rather crossly. "I'm much too busy, and it is only some nonsense of yours."

"Thank you," said Allen, laughing; "mother shall judge of that."

"It does seem a shame to desert you, my dear," said Carey, "but you see--"

What Janet was to see was stifled in the flap of the handkerchief with which Allen was binding her eyes, while Armine and Babie sang rapturously--

"Come along, Mother Carey, Come along to land of fairy;"

an invocation to which, sooth to say, she had become so much accustomed that it prevented her from expecting a fairy-land where it was not necessary to "make believe very much."

Janet so entirely disapproved of the puerile interruption that she never looked to see how Allen and Babie managed the bonnet. She only indignantly picked up the cap which had fallen from the sofa to the floor, and disposed of it for security's sake on the bronze head of Apollo, which was waiting till his bracket could be put up.

Guided most carefully by her eldest son, and with the two little ones dancing and singing round her, and alternately stopping each other's mouths when any premature disclosure was apprehended, pausing in wonder when the cuckoo note, never heard before, came on them, making them laugh with glee.

Thus she was conducted much further than she expected. She heard the swing of the garden gate and felt her feet on the road and remonstrated, but she was coaxed on and through another gate, and a path where Allen had to walk in front of her, and the little ones fell behind.

Then came an eager "Now."

Her eyes were unbound, and she beheld what they might well call enchanted ground.

She was in the midst of a curved bank where the copsewood had no doubt been recently cut away, and which was a perfect marvel of primroses, their profuse bunches standing out of their wrinkled leaves at every hazel root or hollow among the exquisite moss, varied by the pearly stars of the wind-flower, purple orchis spikes springing from black-spotted leaves, and deep-grey crested dog-violets. On one side was a perfect grove of the broad-leaved, waxen-belled Solomon's seal, sloping down to moister ground where was a golden river of king-cups, and above was a long glade between young birch-trees, their trunks gleaming silvery white, the boughs over head breaking out into foliage that looked yellow rather than green against the blue sky, and the ground below one sheet of that unspeakably intense purple blue which is only produced by ma.s.ses of the wild hyacinth.

"There!" said Allen.

"There!" re-echoed the children. "Oh mammy, mammy dear! Is it not delicious?"

Carey held up her hand in silence, for a nightingale was pouring out his song close by; she listened breathlessly, and as it ceased she burst into tears.

"O mother!" cried Allen, "it is too much for you."

"No, dear boy, it is--it is--only too beautiful. It is what papa always talked of and would have so enjoyed."

"Do you think he has better flowers up there?" asked Babie. "I don't think they can be much better."

And without waiting for more she plunged down among the primroses and spread her little self out with a scream of ecstasy.

And verily the strange sense of rapture and enchantment was no less in the mother herself. There is no charm perhaps equal to that of a primrose bank on a sunny day in spring, sight, sound, scent all alike exquisite. It comes with a new and fresh delight even to those to whom this is an annual experience, and to those who never saw the like before it gives, like the first sight of the sea or of a snowy mountain, a sensation never to be forgotten. Fret, fatigue, anxiety, sorrow all pa.s.sed away like dreams in that sweet atmosphere. Carey, like one of her children, absolutely forgot everything in the charm and wonder of the scene, in the pure, delicate unimaginable odour of the primroses, in debating with Allen whether (c.o.c.kneys that they were) it could be a nightingale "singing by day when every goose is cackling," in listening to the marvellous note, only pausing to be answered from further depths, in the beauty of the whole, and in the individual charm of every flower, each heavily-laden arch of dark blue-bells with their curling tips, so infinitely more graceful than their pampered sister, the hyacinth of the window-gla.s.s, of each pure delicate anemone she gathered, with its winged stem, of the smiling primrose of that inimitable tint it only wears in its own woodland nest; and when Allen lighted on a bed of wood-sorrel, with its scarlet stems, lovely trefoil leaves, and purple striped blossoms like insect's wings, she absolutely held her breath in an enthusiasm of reverent admiration. No one can tell the happiness of those four, only slightly diminished by Armine's getting bogged on his way to the golden river of king-cups, and his mother in going after him, till Allen from an adjacent stump pulled them out, their feet deeply laden with mud.

They had only just emerged when the strokes of a great bell came pealing up from the town below; Allen and his mother looked at each other in amused dismay, then at their watches. It was twelve o'clock! Two hours had pa.s.sed like as many minutes, and the boys would be coming home to dinner.

"Ah! well, we must go," said Carey, as they gathered up their armloads of flowers. "You naughty children to make me forget everything."

"You are not sorry you came though, mother. It has done you good," said Allen solicitously. He was the most affectionate of them all.

"Sorry! I feel as if I cared for nothing while I have a place like that to drink up delight in."

With which they tried to make their way back to the path again, but it was not immediately to be found; and their progress was further impeded by a wood-pigeon dwelling impressively on the notes "Take two cows, Taffy; Taffy take TWO!" and then dashing out, flapping and grey, in their faces, rather to Barbara's alarm, and then by Armine's stumbling on his first bird's nest, a wren's in the moss of an old stump, where the tiny bird unadvisedly flew out of her leafy hole full before their eyes. That was a marvel of marvels, a delight equal to that felt by any explorer the world has seen. Armine and Barbara, who lived in one perpetual fairy tale, were saying to one another that

"One needn't make believe here, it was every bit real."

"And more;" added the other little happy voice. Barbara did however begin to think of the numerous children in the wood, and to take comfort that it was unprecedented that their mother and big brother should be with them, but they found the park palings at last, and then a little wicket gate, where they were very near home.

"Mother, where _have_ you been?" exclaimed Janet, somewhat suddenly emerging from the door.

"In Tom Tiddler's ground, picking up gold and silver," said Carey, pointing to the armsful of king-cups, cuckoo-flowers, and anemones, besides blue-bells, orchises, primroses, &c. "My poor child, it was a great shame to leave you, but they got me into the enchanted land and I forgot all about everything."

"I think so," said a gravely kind voice, and Caroline was aware of Ellen's eye looking at her as the Court Queen might have looked at Ophelia if she had developed her taste for "long purples" as Hamlet's widow. At least so it struck Mother Carey, who immediately became conscious that her bonnet was awry, having been half pulled off by a bramble, that her ankles were marked by the bog, and that bits of green were sticking all over her.

"Have you been helping Janet? Oh, how kind!" she said, refreshed by her delightsome morning into putting a bright face on it.

"We have done all we could in your absence," said her sister-in-law, in a reproachful voice.

"Thank you; I'm sure it is very good of you. Janet--Janet, where's the great Dutch bowl--and the little Salviati? Nothing else is worthy of this dear little fairy thing."

"What is it? Just common wood-sorrel," said the other lady, in utter amaze.

"Ah, Ellen, you think me demented. You little know what it is to see spring for the first time. Ah! that's right, Janet. Now, Babie, we'll make a little bit of fairy-land--"

"Don't put all those littering flowers on that nice clean chintz, children," exclaimed the aunt, as though all her work were about to be undone.

And then a trampling of boy's boots being heard and shouts of "Mother,"

Carey darted out into the hall to hear fragments of school intelligence as to work and play, tumbling over one another, from Bobus and Jock both at once, in the midst of which Mrs. Robert Brownlow came out with her hat on, and stood, with her air of patient serenity, waiting for an interval.

Caroline looked up, and said, "I beg your pardon, Ellen--what is it?"

"If you can attend a moment," said she, gravely; "I must be going to my boys' dinner. But Robert wishes to know whether he shall order this paper for the drawing-room. It cannot be put up yet, of course; but Smith has only a certain quant.i.ty of it, and it is so stylish that he said the Colonel had better secure it at once."