basins and crags, and so forth. He found modelling too tedious to carry out himself, and, with characteristic oddness in his employment of means to ends, he set his gardener, the late Dawson Herdson, on the job. Herdson made a very fair general sketch in clay of the Old Man, and the main features as seen from the Coniston side; but he had not pegged out his distances, and when Dow Crag was built up into emphatic gloom, and Leverswater hollowed into depth, the smaller heights had no space left for them, and the effect was altogether too willowpatterned. Then Ruskin put another of his employés to work, and after much labour the model now in the Coniston Museum was evolved.

This was intended to be photographed or engraved in a side-light, as one of a series of physical maps. Another was to have been Savoy, for which Ruskin made the sketch here shown. The black Lake of Geneva is dark blue in his drawing; the valleys are

green, and the mountains roughly knocked in with lamp black and Chinese white, tinted over with yellow for limestone,. pink for Mont Blanc protogine, and red for gneiss. Rough as the sketch is, you see the structure of the Alps, the lie of the land; at a glance, Towns, roads, and all the rest should be shown, he said, on separate plans.

Towards this purpose he collected bird'seye views in great variety, from Maclure and Macdonald's lithograph of the Soudan, to quaint old panoramas, of which one-the mountains seen from the Buet-is quite like a William Blake design of Heaven and Hell, and fit to serve as a background to all the mythologies. Also, for their pleasant picturesqueness, he liked the queer productions of ancient cartographers, such as Edmund Squib's funny map of China (1655), and a seventeenth-century production called "The New Map of Muscovy," and "The Course of the Great River Wolga,"

graphic expression; they don't pretend to be gazetteers, but they take you about the country with the entertainment of a traveller's tale.

They are decorative also; that was another appeal to Ruskin. William Morris has shown in the illustrations to the Saga Library how maps can become picturesque designs, and this was quite on the lines that Ruskin would have followed. He might not have inserted dragons of the deep, nor, as in Drayton's Polyolbion, nymphs and shepherds on the hills and lakes, out of all proportion and possibility; but he thought a map could be far more explanatory and ornamental than the usual School Atlas.

Things that have Happened." You seeand for lack of space I must leave it for your further insight-how he designed to show the roses of Provence and the lilies of France in this garden of, Gaul, at one time feebly struggling, then blowing fully and freely spreading, then broken in upon by the wild beast of war; the lily bed trampled and ruined; Aquitaine wasted to blankness, and so forth. and so forth. Worked out completely, an atlas of history on this plan might be as pretty as any picture-book. A child accustomed to such maps would have little trouble in remembering the outlines of national growth, and the whole tedious business of dates and uncouth names would be infinitely lightened. Perhaps, some day,

W

HEN Eve, our Mother, left the Garden of Paradise, she gathered a lapful of her favourite flowers to take with her, and lo! even as she passed the Gate, the flowers dropped and faded and the white petals shrivelled up and turned brown, the first withered flowers the earth had seen. And Eve's hot tears fell on the flowers and she dropped them down on the threshold of Paradise. small white flower, half-hidden in leaves, grew just within the Gate and when she saw Eve weeping her heart was stirred with pity. "Will she find any flowers to comfort her out there in the thorny waste?" she asked the Angel who stood at the Gate.

Now a

"She forfeited all her flowers and garlands and fruit when she broke the commandment and ate the apple," answered the Angel.

"May none of us go with her out into the wilderness?" asked the flower.

"None," answered the Angel.

"And will the children of men never again have flowers to gladden their eyes and sweeten their toil ?" asked the flower anxiously.

"Yes," said the Angel, "after many hundreds of years the Earth they have watered with their tears and laboured with their hands and trodden with wearied feet will bring forth blossoms again."

"And will she, beautiful Eve, will she be there when the new blossoms come?" asked the flower.

But the Angel shook his head.

long ere that her body will have returned to the dust whence it was made."

"And may I not go with her now?" asked the flower while a shiver passed through its leaves.

"The Law has gone forth," said the Angel sadly, "that neither flower nor beast may pass out of Paradise.”

"And if I broke the Law?" said the flower.

"Then your punishment would be even as Eve's-you would be driven out of Paradise, and in that same hour you would lose your beauty and your glory and be even as the earthborn plant."

"But I should grow at her feet, her fair white feet, and remind her of Paradise and comfort her," said the flower.

"Will you not be content and patient and obedient like the other flowers, and wait till the appointed time comes?" asked the Angel..

"But meantime she will have no one to comfort her."

"But you will lose Paradise," said the Angel.

And

for many a long day the hellebore grew at Eve's feet and looked wistfully up in her face; but the sad, tired eyes never fell on the blossom and no hand was stretched out to gather it. At last when her first-born, her wild, brown-eyed boy, was about a year old, crawling at her feet, he seized on the flower and the mother taking it from his hand dropped a tear on it remembering Paradise. And again, years afterwards when, the awful hour had struck and man's blood shed by man had cried to Heaven for vengeance, on the day when Eve prepared her son's body for burial she gathered a garland of the only flowers she had and laid it on Abel's breast and a drop of blood fell on the wild hellebore. And when the long years were all told and our mother was laid in the earth, the hellebore covered her grave with its leaves and blossoms. This was all she had gained, the touch of tears and of blood and the neighbourhood of death. Then came days still more barren for the hellebore, men no longer had memories of Paradise and no longer looked for flowers and beauty in the earth. Going forth to hunt or to fight or to labour the stubborn earth they passed by the hellebore unheeding. "But the time will come," she thought, "foretold by the Angel, when men will grow gentler and the earth will be subdued and the flowers will leave their Paradise and bloom with men." And the time came, but it only made it worse for the hellebore for the Flowers of Paradise had forgotten that she was akin to them and shrank away from her as if she were an. alien thing, a child of the wild disordered earth. And the children of men crowned themselves with the flowers of Paradise and the heart of the hellebore died within her. Then one night she woke and found the Angel gazing down at her.

"Thou didst break the Law," he said gravely, "for love of the children of men. Have they repaid thee by their love and gratitude?"

"They have cast me out and know me not."

for their sakes. Do they plant thee round their homes and place thee in their garlands?"

"They have driven me out and I dwell alone in the byways of the earth."

"Dost thou repent that thou wert not patient and obedient even as the rest?"

"Nay," said the flower, " for I have been close to sorrow, and to sin, and to death, and know that love is stronger than all."

Then the Angel turned on her the glory of his grave, gracious countenance.

"Have patience," said the Angel, "and when the love that shall conquer sorrow and sin and death is born into the world thou, of all flowers, shalt be the first to see it. And in that hour thy glory shall return to thee."

A still warm night under the blue Syrian sky, every star awake in the blue heavens, every flower hushed and asleep in the green fields, only one small flower, so green, so small, so insignificant you would have taken it for a leaf, was awake, expectarit as it had been every night for hundreds of years. "If it should come to-night," it thought. Then all at once from one end of the broad heavens to the other flashed a great white light, and from the heart of the light was poured in rapture that first Christimas song which, ever since, the world has been trying to learn. And as the first ray of light fell on the hellebore she said in her heart, "Behold it is come."

A rush of hurrying feet, a murmur of eager voices, it was the joyful crowd of shepherds hurrying to the city of Bethlehem. And behind them, sobbing in his haste, limping on a lame foot, in rags, came a little shepherd lad. His heart was of all most eager to welcome the new Master-Shepherd, but his feet were halt and lame, and his hands empty of an offering. What was that among the grass at his feet, fair and white and shining even as a pearl? Was not the earth herself providing the gift for an offering? The lilies of the field, the roses of Sharon were asleep under the stars, it was the white. hellebore that was brought as a gift to the