ONE of the prettiest spots in Woodfield was the old market garden. It was situated in a warm sunny angle, where three of our bowering lanes met, near the ruins of St. Edmund's Abbey. It was unlike any other garden of the kind I ever saw-the old mulberry and pear trees, and espalier apples, whose golden fruits might have tempted wiser nymphs than Atalanta, were evidently relics of departed centuries. I think they must have been planted by the dainty monks of the adjacent monastery, or at any rate grafted from their ancient stock, for with all our horticultural improvements we get no such apples now a days. Their very name bespake their origin. The Abbot's Pippin they were called. That Abbot was a man of taste I'll warrant him, from whose pet seedling first sprang this spicy family. His name is forgotten-his grave is unknown, but these pippins are a perennial monument of his good deeds, in introducing so excellent a stock of apples among the East-Anglian orchards.

The thyme, the fennel, the red sage, and many a flaunting marygold, are still to be found in the green lanes near to the mouldering line of broken arches, which formed the boundary of St. Edmund's Abbey, indubitable landmarks of the ancient herbarium from which the cowled physicians concocted the simple medicines for the village poor, as well as for the petty suzerain of the manor. A hardy race were both the peasant and his lord in those days, when health might be extracted from herbs of grace and flowers of the field, and none ever received such a thing as an apothecary's bill, to raise their spirits after a long illness.

But this is foreign to my present subject, and unless I keep my vagrant ideality in some degree of restraint, my readers will never believe that I am relating a true story, or at least, writing a story whose foundation is based on facts.

The market garden of Woodfield, when I first remember it, was rented by a widow in the decline of life, who with her grandson occupied a low substantially built cottage, with Flemish gables and ancient carved casements, which formed the tenement belonging to the garden. Old Aggy Durrant, as she was called, was not a native of our county, though she had married a Suffolk man. The Woodfield peasants regarded her as a sort of foreigner, saying, "She came out of the shires, and was not one of them." The Suffolk peasantry have the most singular dislike to the natives of any other county than their own, or Norfolk; nor will they, if they can po sibly avoid it, accept a service in any division of England that bears the termination of shire.

“No, ma'am, I cant think of going into the shires," is the reply of these determined clingers to native scenes and oft times to native miseries, but why the idea of a shire should be so displeasing to our worthy East-Anglians, I never could make out. Certain it is however that the South folke are a peculiar people, having very few affections to bestow on strangers. Old Aggy had lived long enough in that cottage to have insured a local settlement in any village, one would think—but no, she was among the people, but not of them. Her accent betrayed her northern origin, her manners and customs differed from theirs. "She neither eat hard dumplings nor white bacon, which made it plain she came out of the shires and was not one of them."

The gossips complained, that no one knew any thing about her, except that she did not manage her garden like other people with proper straight walks and squares of cabbages, squares of potatoes, and squares of other kinds of garden sauce (the name by which the Suffolk peasants class vegetables, when they speak of them collectively) like people who pretended to get their living by selling their sauce, but she had flowerbeds and borders, and winding walks, like sarpents, with boweries at the corners and arches made with climbing plants running over strings and bent sticks. Even her scarlet beans and her pease were set out to look like some out of the way fancy, all denoting the pride and ambition of this strange old woman with her popish name. No one in reality had less of these unpopular qualities than poor old Aggy Durrant. She was the meekest and most benevolent of living creatures. Very liberal halfpenny worths and penny worths of small fruit did she dispense to her juvenile customers; and if she heard of a sick person having a craving desire for fruit, the first gatherings of her strawberries, her cherries, or her plums were freely accorded by her, without looking for payment in

return.

Much as the picturesque arrangement of old Aggy's garden offended

the bad taste of some of her invidious neighbours; it was always a favorite resort on holidays or summer evenings for young persons who wished for quiet enjoyment, a pleasant walk, and a cheap feast, or at night by a little improving conversation with the amiable mistress of this village Eden, for such it was, when under the care of Aggy Durrant. Many a spare hour have I spent in acquiring a little of her practical knowledge in floriculture and herb-ology, for Aggy was learned in the virtues of plants, from the oak to the houseleek. She could distil simple waters and compound rare ointments for curing burns, blisters, and chilblains, and concoct draughts for the relief of coughs, colds, and many other of the maladies to which the poor were subject, and she never inade any charges for her simple medicines, unless to those who could well afford to pay her, The squire's lady and the young ladies at the Hall were great customers to Aggy Durrant for her double distilled rose water and elder flower water, and the apothecary himself privily purchased her miut water and gave her extensive orders for her healing ointments, though he told every one that" she was a shocking old quack, and ought not to be encouraged." He was her best customer nevertheless, and never ordered conserve of roses, conserve of heps, or currant jelly of any one else.

Some people fancied Aggy Durrant must be growing rich, as she had so many ways of getting money, but her profits were too small and her charities too abundant for the acquisition of wealth, and all her savings were employed in the education of her orphan grandson George. Till he was twelve years of age the boy had no other instructor than herself, and it was evident that she understood enough of the rudiments of learning to have enabled her to keep a preparatory school, but Aggy Durrant was of an active turn, and preferred her miscellaneous employments to the sedentary business of tuition. When George, to use her expression, "got beyond her in his learning," Aggy Durrant astonished and offended all her neighbours by actually sending him to a boarding-school kept by a worthy curate in a neighbouring town. As soon as this fact transpired, Aggy had an influx of customers-extraordinary who came, it being winter-time when no cheap winter fruits were in season, for pennyworths of raddish seeds and cabbage seeds and pints of pease and beans, as an excuse for catechising the old lady, on the subject of her grandson's departure from Woodfield and her reasons for sending him to Scrapton school. Aggy had a quiet laconic way of replying to cross-questioning, that might have baffled the most impertinent barrister on a country circuit, and enquiring minds in the neighbourhood. "So you have sent George to boarding-school, Mrs. Durrant," began the baker's wife.

"Yes."

"Why that will be a great expense to you?"

"I cannot make parsons."

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Well, there we know that, though you are so much cleverer than

other people, but we always conceited that you meant to bring him up to the garden."

"And so you have changed your mind about that?"

"About what?

Why about the garden, and people do say you mean to bring the boy up to a business."

"Those who say so would do well to mind their own."

Very true, neighbour, very true, only folks do want to know why George is sent to the boarding-school."

"That he may learn to do his duty in that state of life unto which it may please God to call him," replied Aggy, with more dignity than the baker's wife, whom she had just served with twopenny worth of mustard and cress seeds considered at all becoming to the widow woman from the shires, who rented the market garden at Woodfield.

In common with many others, I always suspected the widowed Aggy had seen better days. One day I told her so. She turned her mild eyes expressively upon me, and replied with impressive brevity,

"I have."

As I was not actuated by the intrinsic spirit of vulgar curiosity, which led our Woodfield gossips to pry into the affairs of their neighbours, I made no other comment upon this rejoinder than a look indicative of the interest I had always taken in Aggy Durrant, from the days when I used to coax our nurse to let us spend our half-holiday pennies in buying strawberries or cherries from her garden. Not. but what we had strawberries, cherries, and all other fruits in their season in our own garden almost ad libitum, but we did not think our fruit half so delicious as that which old Aggy gathered for us, and it was such a treat to sit in her jessamine bower to eat it there, and to look at her flowers and learn all their names, and whether they were to be propagated from seeds or slips, and how to make floral pyramids by training major convolvoluses up strings pegged in a circle, and then all knotted together to a tall lath in a central point.

Every spring we laid out a little fortune with her in choice bulbs and roots and packets of annual seeds for our little gardens, and twice or thrice a week we came to ask old Aggy, "whether she thought we ought to water our transplanted stocks, amaranths, &c. that day and how long it would be before our Indian pinks would bloom." She always gave us the best of advice and a donation of flowers for the beau-pot in the nursery, over and above.

Years past away leading us from infancy to childhood, and from youth to maturity, but though time had wrought so manifestly with us, we perceived no particular change in Aggy and her garden. She had never altered the fashion of her garb-the garb of widowhood, though sometimes, when she attended her customers in the garden, she now covered

her closely drawn cap with a black hood on chilly March days, an indication that she began to shrink from the sharp east winds, but her figure was unbent, and she was always to be seen on Sundays in her accustomed seat in the village church, with her substantially bound book of commonprayer and bible, both of a venerable appearance and dignified with silver clasps. Like Aggy Durrant, they too had seen better days, and like her they did not appear older than when first I remembered them. It was in the widow's grandson that the only remarkable change had taken place. The curly headed school-boy had become a sedate and somewhat sentimental student. Aggy lamented that she could not send him to college. Not that she breathed such a word to her every day customers, who would have laughed the idea to scorn, she only whispered the regret to me, "that she had not made an effort in the first instance to get him into some public school, where he might have earned a scholarship."-" Perhaps," said she, "I have been too proud in dreading to encounter a denial, yet for his sake I ought to have applied to my kinswoman, she could have got George a presentation if she had pleased."

"Can she not now stand his friend in allowing him a maintenance at College?" asked I. "Aye," rejoined Aggy, "if she please, but I do not feel disposed to ask favours of those who scorn me.”

The widow drew her hand over her eyes and remained for some minutes in deep but silent communings with her own soul, and then, after a long pause, she said, "No one can be competent to offer counsel in this matter, who is not acquainted with the real circumstances of the case, and there is no reason why I should conceal them from a true friend."

In my early life I was one of those unfortunate individuals who have no settled station or place in society. Left an orphan at so tender an age, that I scarcely have any remembrance of my parents; I was brought up in the nursery of a proud and wealthy family, to whom I was, it seems, distantly related, but never otherwise acknowledged than as an object of charity. I was what is called an humble dependent, that is to say, a servant without wages. A creature with all the artificial wants and wishes belonging to a lady, without the slightest means of gratifying them. I was the lowly companion of the only daughter of the house, a spoiled and wayward girl, about my own age, to whose caprices I was compelled to conform myself with the submission of a slave. I sometimes thought of the difference in our lots, but when I perceived how greatly my cousin Leonora was hated and feared by every living creature, except her parents, I did not wish to occupy her place, for her haughty and irritable temper rendered her a more pitiable person than myself. When Leonora had been presented at Court, we had many gay doings at the hall, but the only share I had in them was to assist in the preparations, sometimes in the housekeeper's room, sometimes in the conservatories, and occasionally in the decorations of the saloons. I was at that