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Page 54
Before her there were grouped ever so many children, twenty-five or
thirty, perhaps. The tots in the front rows were cosy and comfortable
on piles of cushions, and the seven or eight year olds in the back row
were in seats a little higher. Each child had a sprig of lilac in its
hand. The young girl wore a soft white dress with lavender flowers
scattered all over it, and a great bunch of the flowers in her belt.
She was a lovely creature! At least, I believe she was. I have an
indistinct remembrance that her enemies (if she has any) might call her
hair red; but I could n't stop looking at her long enough at the time
to decide precisely what color it was. And I believe, now that several
days have passed, that her nose turned up; but at the moment, whenever
I tried to see just how much it wandered from the Grecian outline, her
eyes dazzled me and I never found out.
As she seated herself in their midst, the children turned their faces
expectantly toward her, like flowers toward the sun.
"You know it 's the last Monday, dears," she said; "and we 've had our
good-by story."
"Tell it again! Sing it again!" came from two kilted adorers in the
back row.
"Not to-day;" and she shook her head with a smile. "You know we always
stop within the hour, and that is the reason we are always eager to
come again; but this sprig of lilac that you all hold in your hands has
something to tell; not a long story, just a piece of one for another
good-by. I think when we go home, it we all press the flowers in heavy
books, and open the books sometimes while we are away from each other
this summer, that the sweet fragrance will come to us again, and the
faded blossom will tell its own story to each one of us. And this is
the story," she said, as she turned her spray of lilac in her fingers.
* * * * *
There was once a little lilac-bush that grew by a child's window.
There was no garden there, only a tiny bit of ground with a few green
things in it; and because there were no trees in the crowded streets,
the birds perched on the lilac-bush to sing, and two of them even built
a nest in it once, for want of something larger.
It had been a very busy lilac-bush all its life: drinking up moisture
from the earth and making it into sap; adding each year a tiny bit of
wood to its slender trunk; filling out its leaf-buds; making its leaves
larger and larger; and then--oh, happy, happy time!--hanging purple
flowers here and there among its branches.
It always felt glad of its hard work when Hester came to gather some of
its flowers just before Easter Sunday. For one spray went to the table
where Hester and her mother ate together; one to Hester's teacher; one
to the gray stone church around the corner, and one to a little lame
girl who sat, and sat, quite still, day after day, by the window of the
next house.
But one year--this very last year, children--the lilac-bush grew tired
of being good and working hard; and the more it thought about it, the
sadder and sorrier and more discouraged it grew. The winter had been
dark and rainy; the ground was so wet that its roots felt slippery and
uncomfortable; there was some disagreeable moss growing on its smooth
branches; the sun almost never shone; the birds came but seldom; and at
last the lilac-bush said, "I will give up: I am not going to bud or
bloom or do a single thing for Easter this year! I don't care if my
trunk does n't grow, nor my buds swell, nor my leaves grow larger! If
Hester wants her room shaded, she can pull the curtain down; and the
lame girl can"--_do without_, it was going to say, but it did n't
dare--oh, it did n't dare to think of the poor little lame girl without
any comforting flowers; so it stopped short and hung its head.
Six or eight weeks ago Hester and her mother went out one morning to
see the lilac-bush.
"It does n't look at all as it ought," said Hester, shaking her head
sadly. "The buds are very few, and they are all shrunken. See how
limp and flabby the stems of the leaves look!"
"Perhaps it is dead," said Hester's mother, "or perhaps it is too old
to bloom."
"I like that!" thought the lilac-bush.
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