now, when cotton can so easily be brought from hot countries.

Flax made the beautiful fine linen of Egypt. Who would have thought of burying the Egyptian dead, in the time of the Pharaohs, with delicate cambric handkerchiefs on their faces as fine as any lady now? The best and most lasting of that beautiful thing, lace, is made of thread from flax. Linen is so called from Linum, the Latin for flax. The thread is really the fine fibres of the stalks, very thin, but very tough, so that it lasts when all the green part has been soaked off in water.

Flax seeds are called linseed, and are so oily that they are made into cakes to feed cattle upon in the winter. And linseed meal is mixed with mustard to make plasters to put on people's chests when they have bad colds. little dainty blue flower is by no means all for show. Its Latin name may well be Linum Usitatissimum—the most used.

That

Last of this cousinhood is the woodsorrel tribe. Still with delicate thin petals or veined petals. All the plants have a very sharp taste. Our English one is the lovely woodsorrel. Delicate little thing; do you not delight in finding its beds, full of those pale green trefoil leaves and exquisite white flowers streaked with purple? In Germany it is called the Hallelujah, and is thought the special flower of Trinity Sunday, because of its threefold leaves.

Holly properly comes here; but you must go back to the "Christmas Evergreens," in the eleventh chapter, for it, and for the spindle tree.

CHAPTER XIX

BALSAMS AND NASTURTIUMS

VERY odd-shaped flowers are coming next. Creatures with queer little tails, and strange habits as to their seeds. First of these is the Balsam, once deemed so medicinal that the very name implies something healing, though now it is only an ornament for our gardens and hothouses. You remember that the violet is a pentagon flower, and you will soon see that the form of the balsam is nearly similar, except that the petals are more irregular, and instead of the short blunt spur of the violet it has quite a long, sharply-pointed curly tail. There is one English sort, and a very funny fellow it is, with yellow long spurred flowers, and capsules so irritable that the moment they are touched their little valves fly open, as if by a spring, and curl themselves up, while the seeds pop out with a bounce, and scatter themselves in all directions. For this reason it is called in English the Touch-me-not, and in Latin the Impatiens Noli-me-tangere, which means the same thing. Though English, this hasty gentleman, or rather lady for in some places it is called Jumping Betty is not very frequent, and the only place where I ever saw it growing wild was on the side of a deep ravine, in which the streamlet winds along which forms the cascade, of Stock Gill Force at Ambleside. It is often,

however, grown in gardens, as well as its almost equally impatient Levantine cousin, the purple balsam, a tall handsome plant, with purple flowers and stems tinged with red, the leaves growing in pairs at the joints. The red and white balsam, grown in hotbeds and nursed in drawing-rooms, is, I believe, a Cochin Chinese, and there is a pink Sultana from Zanzibar.

Peru is apt to grow sun-coloured flowers, and thence comes what we foolishly call the Nasturtium, though it has two very good old English names, Indian cress and yellow lark's heels, besides a real Latin one, Tropæolum, or trophy, given because the leaves are like shields, and the flowers like golden helmets. It is a droll flower, with its. yellow calyx growing out into a long spur behind, and the little fringes to its yellow or orange petals. These petals are very good when put into a salad, which is the reason, I suppose, of their being called Indian cress; and it is said that just before sunrise, especially in thundery weather, they give out flashes of light, as a black cat's back does on a frosty night. All I can tell you about the cause of this wonder is that it is the effect of electricity, and there we stop short, neither of us much the wiser. The prettiest sort of tropaolum is the little canary-bird flower, so called because it is just like a little yellow bird, the bud like a canary with its wings closed, the half-expanded flower like one flying, and the full-blown like a bold cock canary, wings and tail full-spread, darting out at an enemy; and there is a small three-coloured sort, black, yellow, and red, grown in hot-houses.

Rue, which used to be held as good for fevers, gives name to the next order. Also there is one for the Quassia tree, which furnishes very wholesome bitter but strengthening medicine.

K

CHAPTER XX

TREES

THE tribes that follow are chiefly trees. The first is the holly, of which we had plenty to say at Christmas.

Then comes the maple. The maple has eight stamens growing in a small green blossom. The fruit is very

curious, two long lobes, commonly called keys, hanging down from a long stem, and each containing one seed. The maple changes the colour of its leaves early in autumn, and looks very gay in the hedges; its leaves too are of a very pretty lobed form, especially those of that large handsome kind the sycamore. The sap too of one kind is very sweet, so sweet that in North America it is made into sugar; I have seen a cake of brown coarselooking maple sugar, such as each Canadian farmer makes for his own use, just as we make cheeses.

And another tribe is named by that noble tree the horse-chestnut. I cannot tell where the native country of the horse-chestnut may be; some say it is among the mountains to the north of India, and I should guess that it must be a rather cold place, because the buds are so well protected from the winter's frost.

We see them even before Christmas, pointing up their hard, sticky, dark brown noses in readiness for the next

spring, and if you wish to see a pretty sight I will tell you what to do. Take one of these buds, and with a sharp knife and steady hand make what in learned language is called a longitudinal section of it, that is to say, cut it in two, lengthways, just as the meridians of longitude are marked on the globe. First you see there is an outer case of hard brown scales, covered with gum to keep all safe and firm; there are at least as many as seventeen to one bud, lapping one over the other, so that Jack Frost may pinch as hard and tight as he chooses without doing the least damage to the precious little gem1 within. A lady packs up her gems and jewels in her morocco cases, lined with satin, and made soft with cotton wool; but nature guards her jewels still more choicely, for smoother than satin is the green lining of the innermost of these gummy scales, and finer than cotton wool is the soft silky down within them, where nestles the young spike of blossoms and leaves. You can already see the form of the tapering spike, and the green of the mites of leaves, and if you have a little microscope, and are always hunting for objects for it, you will be delighted to see for yourself how perfect the whole branch of leaves and blossoms is already in this embryo state. Is it not beautiful? And the more we look into them the more we see the perfection of these works of a Divine Hand; a German botanist, with a much better glass than we are likely ever to have the use of, managed to count the flowers, sixtyeight in number, and to see the pollen on the stamens.

In the Spring the sun dries up the gum, the scales crack off, and are strewn under the tree, as we pull brown paper off a parcel; and as if a fairy wand had touched them, out burst the light green leaves, like drooping fans, 1 Gemma, a gem, is the Latin name for a leaf-bud.