perhaps; as long as we dally with it, and touch it, and taste it, and pity ourselves, it seems very bad, but take to it bravely and grapple with it at once, and there is an end of the matter, and most likely there is no sting at all. Did you ever find it so ?

Boys well know that this is the only way to treat nettles, and sometimes they take in other children in a way I do not approve of at all, by running after them with a bunch of nettles, calling out, "This is the month that nettles don't sting," and when the poor silly child has been persuaded to give a timid touch, the very way to get stung, they laugh, and say, "Oh, I told no story, I said nettles didn't sting the month, not that they would not sting you." But I call this a regular cheat, and very unkind, so I put this in as a warning.

The reason of this is, that all the little white hairs that cover the stem and leaves of the nettle are bristles, like a serpent's tooth, each with a little bag of poison at the bottom, which a slight pressure squeezes into the hand through the tiny pipe into the bristle, whereas a good hard squeeze crushes bristle and bag together and makes them harmless. It is only such poison as inflames the skin but does no harm if eaten. When vegetables were more scarce, and there was famine in the land, we hear of boiled nettle tops being used for food, and they are sometimes given now to young turkeys. The flowers grow like many four-stamened ones in flocks; they are green, and the fertile have shorter stems than the barren, which hang out rather prettily in autumn along the serrated leaves.

Do you remember the fairy tale of the seven princes who were turned into swans, and could only be restored to their true selves by putting on shirts which their little sister was to spin from nettles? It used to seem to me a

stranger fancy than it does now that I have found out that in countries too cold for flax and hemp the fibres of nettles were much used to make sheets, etc. The Scotch poet Campbell, who wrote "Ye Mariners of England," and "The Battle of the Baltic," said that his mother liked nettle sheets better than any others, and nettle thread was once much used.

A plant that grows on old walls, with dark stems, large green leaves, and tiny blossoms at their base, some with tufted stigmas others with odd curled stamens, is called pellitory of the wall, and belongs to these.

NATURA AN & si mr here, but it we na te ih vorms v džez tough many Bad Berates a prer rays, wind HORNS, Khi se the white moths come me * ne long Nord and are often to be pong tail gain the he he pick up the fruit valgi & Ne is very much.

There used

to be an old notion that a mulberry tree never bore fruit till three cats had been buried under it!

The fig is most curious. Did you ever see a fig flower? No. There are only young figs. The blossoms are really inside that green coat; and what is even stranger, the barren and fertile flowers are not within the same fig. How is the pollen ever to get at the pistil? The way is this. There is a little hole at the top, and a small fly has been created which bears the nectar of fig flowers. So it goes from one young fig to the other, and carries the pollen of one to the ovaries of the others, so that the fruit can grow. The little figs which fall off unripe are those that had only stamens in them. Perhaps the barren fig tree that our Lord withered, as a visible parable to the Jews, had refused to open its figs to the fertilising fly. Is it not wonderful!

The fig-tree, with its fine broad leaves, belongs to Syria, and will not grow in cold parts of England. Its leaves fall off at the first frost. The first fig trees were brought to England in the time of King James I. by a scholar who was sent to study books and plants in the Holy Land. He brought the plants to show the English what was meant by sitting under one's own fig tree. Figs keep well, and we get them packed in boxes. Sykos was their Greek name, and the tree Zaccheus climbed into was not our sycamore, but a wild fig. You may have heard the word sycophant, for a bad mean man, who gets favour by evil means. It used to mean- -in Greek-a man who informed against people who sent their figs out of the country without permission from the government.

Hemp comes next, a handsome plant, as you may see if your pet bird's hemp seed falls into the garden and grows. It is of the same tribe with the hop. If you live in a hop district you know the look and smell of them most

CHAPTER XXXIV

FIGS AND HOPS

SOME curious trees come now—all trees with milky juice, and with their stamens and pistils in different tiny flowers.

The mulberry tree is one of these, with fruit like a red blackberry, and leaves which are the favourite food of the silkworm.

There is an Italian saying, "With patience the mulberry leaf becomes satin." But the silkworm, spinning its own pale golden shroud, must have worked first.

The leaf is shaped so like the peninsula of Greece in the map that the Venetians called the place the Morea, from Moro, their word for the mulberry tree.

These trees were first brought to England in the time of Henry VIII. James I. advised every one to plant them, breed silkworms, and get silk woven here, but it turned out too cold for the worms to thrive, though many children still watch their caterpillars in paper trays, wind off their soft yellow silk, and see the white moths come out. The trees are very long lived, and are often to be found in old gardens, where those who pick up the fruit in their childhood get to like it very much. There used