with patterns of green. In America it is much used for cattle, and I believe a horse at an inn door will eat a pumpkin when our horses would be having hay. A pumpkin pie, too, is one of the favourite dishes; it is what we should call a pudding—there is no crust over it, the pumpkin being mashed up and used with egg and milk as we use sago or arrowroot in making a pudding.

Pumpkins make us think of Cinderella's coach, and there is another funny story of them with which I will end my chapter. It is rather old, but perhaps you may not know it. An idle man once lay down under an oak tree and began thinking with himself how much better he could settle the world if he had the power. For instance, what a pity it was to see such a fine lordly tree as the oak bearing such a wretched little fruit as the acorn; it ought to be ashamed of itself, while there was the pumpkin going crawling on the ground with those large handsome fruits. For his part, he thought acorns were good enough for such plants, and that pumpkins ought to grow on oak trees.

Just then he felt a tap on his nose; he jumped up in a hurry, and found it was an acorn that had fallen on him. "Oh!" cried he, "how lucky this was not a

pumpkin !"

You may have your laugh, and then think whether this fable does not show that when people dare to find fault with the wisdom of God's doings it is their own ignorance that is displayed.

The climbers of the pentagon race have a very pretty relative here, with the same pinnate leaves, corkscrew tendrils, bright berries, green blossoms, and climbing stems; the wild vine, or white bryony, which throws itself about on all the bushes within its reach and adorns

them with its graceful shoots. There is one which I have been watching all the summer creeping up a tall pink thorn, and it is now nearly at the top.

There follow Begonias, hot-house plants from America, with curious highly-coloured one-sided leaves. You may generally meet them at a flower show of all manner of shades of red or yellow.

CHAPTER XXV

PRICKS AND UMBRELLAS

MORE many-petalled flowers are to come, the great Cactus race, sometimes called melon-thistles. I have only known them in greenhouses or windows, where they unfold their rich scarlet or pink blossoms on their ungainly, leafless, prickly stems, bristling with tufts that seem as if they had been pulled out of a tooth-brush, and stinging the unwary finger. The finest we see is the Cactus Grandiflorus, a very handsome red flower, with an exquisite tinge of purple within, and a long tongue of white stamens clustered close together; or there is the pink kind, and a second pink one, that creeps about in long ropes covered with bristles, and very seldom does its owners the favour of blossoming. At gardeners' shops we now and then see odd-looking round things, like little melons, stuck all over with tufts of hoary spikes, like vegetable hedgehogs, and now and then, by good luck, bearing one small pink blossom in the centre of each tuft; or perhaps some kind friend has brought you home, from the Pantheon bazaar, one of these droll little wonders, growing in the smallest of red flower-pots, and looking more like a thing in a doll's house than a living plant; but all this gives us very little notion of what a cactus really is-no, and we should

not be much nearer the truth even if we had seen them growing in the beautiful rocky gardens of the Scilly Isles, where they hang down with their rich red blossoms over almost perpendicular faces of rock.

As far as I can make out, a cactus, in its own tropical regions of South America, is like a vegetable boa-constrictor, covered with porcupine's quills, hog's bristles, or wasp stings, in addition to the most magnificent crimson, scarlet, or yellow flowers. Some of them are so large and thick that they produce solid wood, and they hang from tree to tree in matted, tangled ropes, twisted in and out so thickly as to be perfectly impenetrable. The axe of man is soon wearied out in struggling with them; and the wild animals themselves cannot force their way through, but can only pass through lanes, as it were, in the forest, which their own constant tread has worn down, while even jaguars cannot descend through the tangled mass below the branches of the trees. Two missionary settlements, but half a mile apart, situated on different small streams running into the same river, have not the least communication with each other through the jungle, and the only way of going from one to another is by descending one stream and ascending the other, a distance of eight or nine miles.

In India fences are made with cactus, and the unwary who have tried to get through them have come out stuck completely over with spikes, pinning the clothes and even boots fast down to the flesh. In fact, as a fortification for a garden, the cactus must be acknowledged to be superior even to our own holly hedge. Of the same race is the great night-blowing cereus, a rich white flower that only opens by night, and with its flame-coloured stamens, as it unfolds in its own flowery land of Mexico, looks almost like a great lamp.

It would be hard to love a cactus for its own sake, though many love it for putting them in mind of some friendly window where the red blossoms have peered over the white blind, and kind voices and cheerful faces have dwelt; but the staring flower and unshady stem have few personal charms.

There follow it the sun-basking flowers or Mesembryanthemums dreadful word to look at, but only meaning noon-flower, a thing with a star blossom, and thick, fat, fleshy leaves, that hang over rocks and walls in the

sun.

Both these hot, high-coloured sunny things are great contrasts to their neighbours, the quiet, homely umbrella carriers, or umbelliferous plants, so called from the Latin word umbella, an umbel, or little shade.

They are not, however, by any means the most shady of the vegetable tribe, for few are of any great height or size, and their leaves are so deeply cut and carved, so slender and so branching, that even a parasol-ant would hardly be sheltered under one. They have nothing of the umbrella but the spokes.

First, there rises from the ground one tall straight stem, often hollow, and sometimes either ribbed, curiously spotted, or covered with hairs. The leaves, spreading and elaborately pinnate, grow for the most part close to the root, and a few more grow at the joints of the stem.

Each stem is terminated by an umbel, that is to say, five, six, seven, or eight little slender branches, all growing out from it, as their common centre, and all of equal length, like the ribs of a fan. From each of these there springs a second set of lesser spokes, each of which bears a small flower, with five petals, five stamens, and two pistils.