These flowers are usually white, yellow, or green, and so much alike are the plants of the tribe in general appearance that it is not easy to distinguish one from the other. Almost all have an oval fruit, which splits into two halves when ripe and becomes brown. The prettiest seed among them is that of the shepherd's needle, a low plant, which you may easily find among the corn, with some of its umbels still bearing white flowers, whilst others stretch out the long sharp-pointed beaks of their seeds, from which they have taken the name of Shepherd's needle, or Venus's comb.

Umbelliferous plants usually are found in temperate climates, and, strangely enough, they are in most cases unwholesome in their native state, though, when cultivated, they become very valuable vegetables. Carrot, fennel, parsley and celery, all have wild brothers, which it would be very dangerous to eat, and even our garden celery is only made wholesome by being kept in the dark, halfburied in the earth, which, though it makes it very pale and yellow for want of the light of the sun, deprives it at the same time of its poisonous qualities.

Carrots have by diligent cultivation been brought to be those large bright orange-coloured roots which look so tempting when sliced into broth. Their leaves, too, are remarkably pretty, and in the days of the shops of which I told you before, the carrot-bed was our best warehouse for silk dresses, as the variety of colours, purple, crimson, scarlet, yellow, and green, all blended together, was such as no other plant furnished.

Caraway seeds, which we find in seed-cakes, belong to an umbelliferous plant; and that best of sweetmeats, angelica, is made from the stem of another which grows in wet places.

Earth-nuts, which all country children are perpetually seeking in vain, lured on by the legend of some elder cousin, who once dug up a beauty, are the tubers belonging to a very pretty umbelliferous plant, with star-like blossoms and delicate leaves, and a fibrous root, with a tuber that unskilled hands generally leave behind.

Hogweed has rough hairy pinnate leaves that children often bring home from the hedges to delight the pig with, and late in the year it bears large umbels, so thick and close that they make quite hollow cups.

Cow-parsley is a delicate pretty plant, and its purple stem in early spring, fluted like a pencil-case, and covered with small white hairs, is one of the most beautiful of unregarded common things.

The largest of the tribe that is common among us is the tall poisonous hemlock, whose ribbed and spotted stem is so well known to village boys as being capable of being made into a sort of musical instrument for the perpetrating of horrible noises, causing great exertion to themselves, and making their sisters stop their ears and run away. An immense kind, called the chandelier hemlock, has lately been brought to our gardens from America. It is like the common sort seen through a magnifier; it is to common hemlocks what the Mississippi is to other rivers.

The gout-weed has handsome dark green smooth leaves and a creeping root, very hard to turn out when once it has made its way into a garden. It used to prevail to a great extent in my own little nook; and no wonder, you will say, when you hear the way I managed it, which was so silly that I can hardly believe any child could have thought of it.

"Mamma, I am going to give up half my garden to

that weed and see if it will not be contented with that."

Well, I was a bad gardener; but it will be well for us if we do not treat the gardens within in the same fashion, by letting some one fault go on unchecked, for it will as surely eat up and ruin our hearts as the gout-weed did my poor little piece of ground.

The sanicle, a curious plant growing in woods, has umbel-forming little balls of brownish white flowers, and is the last of the tribe that seems to be worth noticing.

You might be tempted to think that the cornel tree was umbellate, but it has not the regularity of the true umbrella, and has irregularly-formed heads, called cymes. The commonest sort is the dog-wood, which has little white blossoms, rather shabby, and dark purple berries. Its beauty is in autumn, when its leaves turn to all kinds of colours-very dark purple, almost black, reds, and yellows, framing the hedge with new glories in decay.

CHAPTER XXVI

HONEYSUCKLE AND ELDER

WE have gone through most of our acquaintance of the many-petalled flowers with stamens on the calyx, and now we begin on those which have all their corolla in one, so that when it drops it looks for a little while as if the whole flower had fallen. We start with the honeysuckle, or woodbine, far from a regular flower, though constant to the rule of five. Delightful honeysuckle! a dweller indeed by our paths and homes, and a constant longenduring friend, its stem becoming hard wood, and growing on and on till perhaps generation after generation have been born and died within the house where it spreads and luxuriates, and the children who have gathered its fragrant blossoms have grown old, still owning them as an unchanged part of their home.

A constant, early, hardy friend it is, its twin leayes coming out first of all, even in the midst of winter, bringing cheerful promise of spring, and hanging on the bare boughs through many a return of cold and storm, bearing the chill crystals of hoar frost as merrily as if they were but dewdrops of a summer morning. A constant friend, indeed, as many a hazel stick can testify, so constant that it becomes part of the very wood itself,

actually one with it, assuming the same bark, and giving it a strange twisted, whorled appearance, as if a snake had twined round it. Most boys have met with these twisted sticks, and in that case the friendship has generally ended in the death of both, for who could resist cutting such a precious walking-stick, unless, indeed, it was in a wood where such cutting was forbidden!

There are two sorts of wild honeysuckle; one is all white outside with the interior of a pale glazy cream colour, and with leaves making a cup round the stem. It blooms in the autumn. The other is red on the outside,

and has leaves in pairs. They are alike in all the main points, such as the long, pin-like pistil, the five slender stamens, the corolla with its very long throat, the little drop of perfumy nectar at the bottom, and the top deeply cut into two divisions one long and thread-like, the other broad and notched into four scallops, so as to keep up the pentagon character. Then look at the bud, how the wide part is doubled down, and the slender linear division closes down over it, with a red edge marking its form, buds and fully opened blossoms all standing in graceful, bending, diverging positions on the common receptacle, guarded a little way down by leaves embracing the stem, one of the most elegant, the sweetest, and most charming of all our plants. The fruit is a red, glossy berry, which you may often find in clusters in the winter.

There is besides the French honeysuckle, with small sweet blossoms out of very red buds and long red shoots; and the pretty variegated Chinese honeysuckle, whose few blossoms are delicious.

Of the same tribe is the pretty white Snowberry with its little pink flowers in pairs. It came originally from Canada, but it likes our climate so well, and has been