The lavender-bush has no splendor like the roses, has no colors like the
hollyhocks; it is a simple, plain, gray thing that the bees love and that
the cottagers cherish, and that keeps the moth from the homespun linen,
and that goes with the dead to their graves.
It has many virtues and infinite sweetness, but it does not know it or
think of it; and if the village girls ever tell it so, it fancies they
only praise it out of kindness as they put its slender fragrant spears
away in their warm bosoms. Bebee was like her lavender, and now that this
beautiful Purple Emperor butterfly came from the golden sunbeams to find
pleasure for a second in her freshness, she was only very grateful, as
the lavender-bush was to the village girls.
"I will give you your breakfast," said Bebee, flushing rosily with
pleasure, and putting away the ivy coils that he might enter.
"I have very little, you know," she added, wistfully. "Only goat's milk
and bread; but if that will do--and there is some honey--and if you would
eat a salad, I would cut one fresh."
He did enter, and glanced round him with a curious pity and wonder both
in one.
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