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Rh five feet tall; her hands were long and thin, quick and fluttering, like her lips. Altogether Jane was exactly the opposite of her prim, old-time name.

These two Garden girls had received Garden names from their father and his family. He had been Doctor Elias Garden, doctor of letters and physics, not of medicine; a grave man, devoted to study, old of his age, and that age twelve years more than his wife’s, to whom he had left his three little girls, when Mary was four years old, by dying untimely.

The third child this girl-wife had named. The mother was but twenty-four, and she was understood to have been fond of sentiment and the ornamental; she named her baby Florimel, out of Spenser’s “Fairy Queen.” This proved to be a misfit name even more than Jane’s. Florimel was a dark little witch, black-haired, black-eyed, white of skin, with red cheeks and red lips, a tomboy when she was small, an absolute genius at mischief as she grew older, devoid of the least love of the sentimental. She whistled like the blackbird Mary called her, climbed trees, fell out of them, tore dresses, bruised flesh, got into scrapes, but also out of them, through her impetuosity. She was a firebrand in temper, yet