“Perhaps you are not aware, ma’am,” he began again, and ceasing his labor stood up leaning on the spade, which was nearly as high as himself, “that many of the seeds which fall upon the ground do not grow, yet, strange to tell, retain the power of growth.  I suspect myself, but have not had opportunity of testing the conjecture, that such fall in their pods, or shells, and that before these are sufficiently decayed to allow the sun and moisture and air to reach them, they have got covered up in the soil too deep for those same influences.  They say fishes a long time bedded in ice will come to life again:  I can not tell about that, but it is well enough known that if you dig deep in any old garden, such as this, ancient, perhaps forgotten flowers, will appear.  The fashion has changed, they have been neglected or uprooted, but all the time their life is hid below.  And the older they are, the nearer perhaps to their primary idea!”

By this time she was far more composed, though not yet had she made up her mind what to say, or how to treat the dilemma in which she found herself.

After a brief pause therefore, he resumed again: 

“I don’t fancy,” he said, with a low, asthmatic laugh, “that we shall have many forgotten weeds come up.  They all, I suspect, keep pretty well in the sun.  But just think how the fierce digging of the crisis to which the great Husbandman every now and then leads a nation, brings back to the surface its old forgotten flowers.  What virtues, for instance, the Revolution brought to light as even yet in the nature of the corrupted nobility of France!”

“What a peculiar goblin it is!” thought Juliet, beginning to forget herself a little in watching and listening to the strange creature.  She had often seen him before, but had always turned from him with a kind of sympathetic shame:  of course the poor creature could not bear to be looked at; he must know himself improper!

“I have sometimes wondered,” Polwarth yet again resumed, “whether the troubles without end that some people seem born to—­I do not mean those they bring upon themselves—­may not be as subsoil plows, tearing deep into the family mold, that the seeds of the lost virtues of their race may in them be once more brought within reach of sun and air and dew.  It would be a pleasant, hopeful thought if one might hold it.  Would it not, ma’am?”

“It would indeed,” answered Juliet with a sigh, which rose from an undefined feeling that if some hidden virtue would come up in her, it would be welcome.  How many people would like to be good, if only they might be good without taking trouble about it!  They do not like goodness well enough to hunger and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have that they may buy it; they will not batter at the gate of the kingdom of Heaven; but they look with pleasure on this or that aerial castle of righteousness, and think it would be rather nice to live in it!  They do not know that it is goodness all the time