“This is what your loving Jenny Wren calls the best time of the day and night,” said the person of the house; adding, “I have been thinking to-day what a thing it would be, if I should be able to have your company till I am married, or at least courted.  Because when I’m courted, I shall make him do some of the things that you do for me.  He couldn’t brush my hair like you do, or help me up and downstairs like you do, and he couldn’t do anything like you do; but he could take my work home, and he could call for orders in his clumsy way.  And he shall too. I’ll trot him about, I can tell him!”

Jenny Wren had her personal vanities—­happily for her—­and no intentions were stronger in her breast than the various trials and torments that were, in the fulness of time, to be inflicted upon “him.”

“Wherever he may happen to be just at present, or whoever he may happen to be,” said Miss Wren, “I know his tricks and his manners, and I give him warning to look out.”

“Don’t you think you’re rather hard upon him?” asked her friend smiling, and smoothing her hair.

“Not a bit,” replied the sage Miss Wren, with an air of vast experience.  “My dear, they don’t care for you, those fellows, if you’re not hard upon ’em?”

In such light and playful conversation, which was the dear delight of Jenny Wren, they continued until interrupted by Mr. Wrayburn, a friend of Lizzie’s, who fell to talking playfully with Jenny Wren.

“I think of setting up a doll, Miss Jenny,” he said.

“You had better not,” replied the dressmaker.

“Why not?”

“You are sure to break it.  All you children do.”

“But that makes good for trade, you know, Miss Wren,” he returned.

“I don’t know about that,” Miss Wren retorted; “but you’d better by half set up a pen-wiper, and turn industrious, and use it.”

“Why, if we were all as industrious as you, little Busy Body, we should begin to work as soon as we could crawl, and there would be a bad thing!”

“Do you mean,” returned the little creature with a flush suffusing her face, “bad for your backs and your legs?”

“No, no,” said the visitor, shocked at the thought of trifling with her infirmity.  “Bad for business.  If we all set to work as soon as we could use our hands, it would be all over with the dolls’ dressmakers.

“There’s something in that,” replied Miss Wren, “you have a sort of an idea in your noddle sometimes!” Then, resting one arm upon the elbow of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking vacantly before her, she said in a changed tone:  “Talking of ideas, my Lizzie, I wonder how it happens that when I am working here all alone in the summer-time, I smell flowers.  This is not a flowery neighborhood.  It’s anything but that.  And yet as I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers; I smell rose-leaves till I think I see the rose-leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the floor; I smell fallen leaves, till I put down my hand—­so—­and expect to make them rustle; I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was among.  For I have seen very few flowers indeed in my life.”