After this evening I had neither rest nor peace.  I felt continually, as I had always felt when spring was at hand, restless and merry, and as if some great good fortune or something extraordinary were about to befall me.  My wretched accounts in especial never would come right, and when the sunshine, playing among the chestnut boughs before my window, cast golden-green gleams upon my figures, illuminating “Bro’t over” and “Total,” my addition grew sometimes so confused that I actually could not count three.  The figure “eight” always looked to me like my stout, tightly-laced lady with the gay head-dress, and the provoking “seven” like a finger-post pointing the wrong way, or a gallows.  The “nine” was the queerest, suddenly, before I knew what it was about, standing on its head to look like “six,” whilst “two” would turn into a pert interrogation-point, as if to ask me, “What in the world is to become of you, you poor zero?  Without the others, the slender ‘one’ and all the rest, you never can come to anything!”

I had no longer any ease in sitting before my door.  I took out a stool to make myself more comfortable, and put my feet upon it; I patched up an old parasol, and held it over me like a Chinese pleasure-dome.  But all would not do.  As I sat smoking and speculating, my legs seemed to stretch to twice their size from weariness, and my nose lengthened visibly as I looked down at it for hours.  And when sometimes, before daybreak, an express drove up, and I went out, half asleep, into the cool air, and a pretty face, but dimly seen in the dawning except for its sparkling eyes, looked out at me from the coach window and kindly bade me good-morning, while from the villages around the cock’s clear crow echoed across the fields of gently-waving grain, and an early lark, high in the skies among the flushes of morning, soared here and there, and the Postilion wound his horn and blew, and blew—­as the coach drove off, I would stand looking after it, feeling as if I could not but start off with it on the instant into the wide, wide world.

I still took my flowers every day, when the sun had set, to the marble table in the dim arbor.  But since that evening all had been over.  Not a soul took any notice of them, and when I went to look after them early the next morning, there they lay as I had left them, gazing sadly at me with their heads hanging, and the dew-drops glistening upon their fading petals as if they were weeping.  This distressed me, and I plucked no more flowers.  I let the weeds grow in my garden as they pleased, and the flowers stayed on their stalks until the wind blew them away.  Within me there were the same desolation and neglect.