with a very large nosegay of flowers, that evidently came from no garden of theirs, and which they triumphantly gave to us. We asked about them, and found that our old friend was now in service at a gardener's, had come home for a Sunday, and had got leave to bring these beautiful flowers, which she sent to us. The part of the nosegay we chiefly admired was this meadow-sweet, and a little while after, to our great surprise, the little girls brought us a present of a root, which their sister had begged from her master. You will guess, after this, that she had conquered her idleness, and was going on very well; and I am glad to tell you that I have heard nothing but good of her since, nothing to spoil the pleasure her meadow-sweet gives me every year when I see its cream-coloured blossoms.

CHAPTER XXII

MOUNTAIN FLOWERS AND POMEGRANATES

WE have come to a very different set of tribes still many petalled, and named from the rock lover the Saxifrage, or Stonecrop. It is a careful observer of the rule of five, with starry five-pointed flowers, yellow, white, or pink, five pistils, and twice five stamens, and fat fleshy leaves, It loves rocks and stone walls, which it growing low. lights up with its bright little stars. There are a great many sorts, best known to those who live in rocky places, and there is one very pretty kind grown in gardens, white, spotted with tiny red dots, and little pink styles and stamens. Some one called it "None So Pretty," and some one else must have thought it conceited, for its other name is London Pride; also it is Irish cabbage and Lady's needlework. Another mountain flower is the Grass of Parnassus. It is not grass at all, but has a white blossom with five round petals, and makes sheets of white in boggy places on mountain sides. It takes its name from Mount Parnassus in Greece, where those poetical ladies the Muses were thought to live.

On moorlands and in bogs grows that very strange plant the Sundew, a great lover of bogs, but very well worth pursuing into them, though you must be an early

riser indeed, if you wish to see its white blossoms open, for they never expand except just at sunrise, and shut up again immediately after it. Yet they and their six pistils are not the strangest part of the plant. Look at its leaves, round green things, widening out from a red stem, the shape of a battledore, and covered with red hairs, and on these red hairs, however hot the sun may be, there is always what looks like a pearl of dew, retained there since the morning. It is not, however, a real drop of dew, it is viscid or sticky, as you will find on touching it, and it exudes from the plant. Sometimes small insects may be found glued to the leaves by this drop of dew, and some persons think that the plant lives on their juices, and that the leaves act as a sort of trap to catch them for it. I do not much like the idea of this pretty flower being so like a beast of prey in its own small way, but it is not the only plant that actually entraps insects and is nourished by them.

The next English tribe that follows contains only one sort of plant, and that plant is remarkable for having only one stamen. You may discover it if you like to take the trouble of poking into a stream of running water, where, waving slowly with the motion of the current, you find the marestail, why so called I cannot tell, since such a tail would look remarkably droll on any horse. It has a round thick fleshy stem, as all water-plants have, a root with a profusion of fibres, which, when you pull it up, bring an immense mass of wood and slime, and leaves, which grow in whorls, that is to say, in circles round the stem, at intervals of about an inch. They are long and narrow; and as to the flower, it is almost as if there was none at all, for there is no corolla and very little calyx. The blossoms, which come out in May and June, have no

stem, and are wedged in at the foot of the leaves; the single anther is red.

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Don't take horsetail for marestail: they are two very different things, and are as far removed from each other as possible, for the horsetail has an unseen blossom," and belongs to the last of the classes; while marestail, though very possibly its blossom may be unseen by you, is in all the dignity of the very few number ones of England.

A very different tribe may be mentioned next. It has many stamens growing on the calyx. Who does not love the myrtle, so pure and fresh, with its tufted stamens and delicious evergreen leaves? It is a home friend, whether reared with pains and care in a little flower-pot on the window-seat, or, as in some favoured places it may be seen, flourishing up to the very eaves of the house. Broadleaved or narrow-leaved, it is always honoured and respected, and treated as something choice-one of the simply dressed but high-born ladies of the flowers, her purity and modest grace, her attraction, without gaiety of colour, as we said before of her companion the jessamine. It grows in perfect thickets in Italy and Greece, though ancient writers say that it was not originally a native, but was brought from Asia. It was highly esteemed by the old Greeks and Romans, and myrtle wreaths were used as well as bay to adorn the victors in their games. It was considered to be the plant of peace and love, and when a general gained any great advantage for his country without bloodshed the myrtle was wound with his garland of bay. The goddess of beauty, Venus, was said to have sprung from the sea-foam with a myrtle wreath round her brow, so the Roman ladies used to put the leaves into the water in their baths, as if they thought beauty must come out of myrtle tea. German

girls each grow a myrtle in a pot, and from her own plant the bride's wreath is woven. The fruit of the myrtle is a purple berry, which seldom or never ripens in England, but was once used in cookery by the Romans. There is, however, a large kind of myrtle growing in Jamaica, which is called the pimento, and which supplies us with allspice for our puddings.

The tribe of loose-strife seems as if it might be so called because the blossoms are both loosely shaped and loosely set on their spikes. They have crumpled petals, and about eleven or twelve stamens more or less. A dry, hard, narrow urn or capsule takes the place of the flowers. One sort is the tall purple loose-strife, which borders our streams with rich purple wands fit for a fairy emperor, with leaves that at touch of autumn turn to a bright rich crimson, or sometimes they make a sheet of gorgeous though sober colouring over a marsh.

That urn of seeds is something like that which is borne by a few more renowned sorts.

The Pomegranate tree is sometimes seen in England against walls, for the sake of its deep crimson blossoms. We must look to the bright Mediterranean shores to find its fruit ripened; rich orange-shaped and coloured fruit, divided into five cells, containing numerous seeds in purple pulp (from which it is called the Pomegranate, the seeded apple), gathered into a sort of crown at the top, formed by the old calyx. Its name puts us in mind of many things: the bells and pomegranates of gold that bordered the robe of the high priest, and the workmanship of the gold of the inside of the Temple, where it must have had some signification which we cannot understand. The Spanish Arabs named their loveliest city Granada, because they thought the form of the soft rounded vale like the outline of the