As for the real Violets, we will take them home, and, while the cherry-tree showers down its blossoms upon us, I will tell you a story to show why the Germans call the Violet the Stepmother. You must pick me a Heart's-ease from the garden, because this species of Violet best explains the reason.

You can see how the flower is what botanists call irregular. How different in form from the lily-like Dog's-Tooth, and the white petals of the Sanguinaria! Hold up the broad purple and yellow petal of the Heart's-ease. This is the Stepmother, dressed with a great deal of gold, with stripes of purple velvet. If you will look, you will see she is so grand that she is sitting on two green seats (two sepals of the calyx). Her own daughters sit, one on each side of her, dressed in purple and less gold than she has, but still very fine, and each has a seat to herself. But the two step-daughters have no gold in their dress, and they must both sit on one seat.

Our little wild Violets do not tell so plainly this story of the Stepmother. You can see, however, how they all have five petals, and how five green sepals grow below, to support them. It has five stamens, and does not thus come under the head of "numerous " stamens; but it can come among those described with "stamens the same number as the petals." We shall thus trace it to the Violet family, and we shall find among the descriptions of these all our wild Violets, from the little, scented, white Violet, that grows in wet places in the meadows, and many different species, to the lonely pedate Violet, that comes later, with large pale lilac flower and yellow centre.

But the wild-flowers now are, day after day, increasing upon us. There is the day of the first Cowslips, who ought to have a whole day to themselves, they make the meadows look so sunny! If you were to look first for the Cowslips in the Index of your Botany, you would be disappointed to find the description of "a tubular calyx, and a pale lilac corolla," and you will have to examine its parts before you can find its place there.

You will find it is of the first sub-class, Division I. It has quickly-falling petals, you will say; but the yellow, shining leaves belong to the calyx, and are sepals, and the flower is one of the Ranunculacea, or Crowfoot family. Can you not see its resemblance to the Buttercup, that is of this family, and is a true Ranunculus? It is a Caltha, and our Botany tells us it should be called Marsh-Marigold, which is a pretty enough name; but who could give up the happy, childish associations that come up with the name of Cowslips?

Everywhere blossoms scattering down upon us, and the Anemones and the Columbines hurrying on! How we regret the many rainy days that intervene, when the fugitive wild-flowers appear, and hurry away again before we have time to pick them!

What days these are for the cascade! Who does not know the cascade, that tumbles down the steep rocks, over soft cushions of moss, rattling among pebbles, playing with the long grass? And the flowers are always on the other side! Which is well, because it gives us a chance for clambering across on the stones, for stooping by the side of the stream, to see how the green ferns are beginning to unroll themselves.

Here, on the other side, is the Arum, with its queer striped green and brown hood. This plant belongs to the Second Class. Its stem is Endogenous. Its hood-like leaf is called a spathe; and this spike that holds the small flowers is called a spadix. It belongs to the same family as the beautiful Egyptian Calla of the greenhouse, and there is a little wild Calla, with a white spathe, to be found in Framingham (Mass.) and a few other places.

Farther in the woods we shall presently find the Anemones, drooping Anemones, some clear white, some purple, and some deeply tinged with red. These, too, are of the Crowfoot family, that has given us so many flowers. Like the Hepatica, these seeming petals are the sepals, and the flower has an involucre of two or three leaves below. Its name came from the wind, because the flower was thought to open only when the wind blows. The Wind-flower has one flower on its drooping stem, the Rue-Anemone has many star-shaped flowers.

The gay Columbines welcome in June. Would you guess that they too are of the Crowfoot family, the Ranunculacea? But they will answer the distinctive description, only these Aquilegia are of a different tribe from the Anemones and Hepaticas. They are of the same tribe as the Cowslip, but a different genus. "Petals five, spur-shaped, longer than the five deciduous sepals; flower unsymmetrical and irregular." They are of the same genus as the Larkspur. The Columbine has a calyx with five sepals, colored like the petals, and five petals with hollow spurs that hold honey. As it droops upon its stalk its spurs turn upwards. Its Latin name of Aquilegia is given it from a fancied resemblance of these spurs to the talons of an eagle, aquila. How gayly they hang over the gray old rocks round which they cluster! How brilliant they look when they grow in troops, as they do near Lark's Shelf, and many other places where you will find them!

Then here is the "Solomon's Seal"! The Polygonatum is the true Solomon's Seal, for it is the root of this plant that bears the scar that gives it its name. It has a creeping, under-ground stem, which is called a root-stock, from which it sends up every spring a fresh stalk, that bears leaves and flowers, and dies away in the autumn. The seal is the round scar left by the dead stalk. The flower consists of a tubular perianth. The greenish-white bells hang, two or more together, all the way up the stem, in the axils of the leaves. You will not find Solomon's monogram on the roots of the Smilacina, the False Solomon's Seal. The perianth is more spreading, and the white flowers are collected in a terminal raceme. This is a form of flower-cluster where each little flower has its own stalk or pedicel gathering round the end of the stem.

The Convallaria bifolia is sometimes called the wild Lily of the Valley. Its flowers are very small, in a terminal raceme, and its low stem rises between two oblong shiny leaves. The Convallaria majalis is the Lily of the Valley that grows in our gardens. The drooping stalk bearing its white bells comes up between two leaves that resemble those of the bifolia, but they are larger.

I wish I could give you in English verses the sad little piece of French

poetry that tells how a poor mother goes out into the country with her little girl to pick the muguet, the lilies of the valley, for sale. The little child must set out early in the morning; not, as you do, for a day's pleasure, but working for her living, looking for flowers in the fields and under the hedges. Then, tired and hungry, she comes back with her mother into the great city,

and must wander round the

streets till they have sold the pretty white flowers, and have earned a little money to buy themselves some food. With this they must go home to their poor lodgings, and get what rest they can before they set out another day, at early sunrise, for another such day's work. Think how hard it must be to have to make a drudgery of the happy occupation of picking flowers! And don't you hope the tired little girl now and then has a chance to rest on a grassy bank, and that the squirrels and the birds make her merry sometimes?

When you come back into town, after a hunt for flowers, with hands laden, think of the

children in the close streets that have not seen a flower all summer long, and, when they come round you asking for "a posy," fill their hands with the gay columbines, or any of the freshest of those that it has given you such pleasure to pick!

The Clintonia has six separate sepals, bell-shaped and lily-like. Can you find it?

The Uvularia, sometimes called Bellwort, though it resembles the Solomon's Seal, comes into a different sub-order. What an exquisite creamywhite color it has, and lily-shaped, hanging flower! Its leaves are called perfoliate, as if bored through for the passage of the stem. It hangs most gracefully, and grows frequently in clusters, as at the mill, where a stream winds round a little peninsula, of which they have possession, and where they make a fairy grove.

On the opposite bank you will find the Polygala, with its "fringe-crested keel" of a rose-purple.

And this reminds us of the Arethusa, with its delicate stalk, and its irregular, rose-purple flower, and the Pogonia,-both of these of the beautiful Orchis family,-growing on the edges of the meadows, near the Side-saddle flowers. What strange flowers these are! Should you recognize in this red

dish umbrella-shaped thing the top of the pistil? It belongs to the Pitcherplants, and has a right to an order pretty much to itself,-not only on account of its odd, reddish-brown flower, but from its leaves, of a hollow, pitcher form. These are usually half filled with water and drowned insects.

But I have had to pass by so many flowers unspoken of, that you must find and study for yourselves! -the Early Saxifrage, the Trientalis, the Trilliums, the Claytonia. There is the lovely Houstonia, that is willing to blossom by the roadside. A little clump of it as it grows is a sight to make one happy for a year. Its pale blue cross-shaped flowers grow in low tufts. It is monopetalous: so it comes into the second division of the first subclass of Class I. It has four stamens, and four lobes to its corolla, and we can bring it into the family of the Rubiacea. Some specimens were found by a German physician named Oldenland, and are called Oldenlandia; but these have received their name from a Dr. Houston, who collected them in Central America. It is allied to the pretty Mitchella, or Partridge-berry, that has twin-flowers on its creeping stalk, and red berries that last all winter, and that we still find when its fresh flowers are opening.

Then there is the Rhodora on the edges of the swamps, - flaming-purple flowers shining out on its leafless, dry-looking branches, - of the Heath family, with the rarer Andromeda.

There is the wilderness of tree-blossoms that have been showering down upon us from the shad-blossom to the apple-blossom, with the wonderful horse-chestnut, and the graceful willows.

There are the Lupines by the woodsides, purplish-blue, sometimes pink,

sometimes white. Sometimes in the same field with the Lupine flashes out the Painted-Cup (Castilleja). Its bright scarlet belongs neither to the corolla nor to the calyx, but to the bracts, - the small leaves from which the flower rises, which are colored as if with a dash from a paint-brush. The corolla is of a greenish yellow.

And the broad field by which we pass into Silent Way sends us the sweet scent of the Purple Clover, - the flowers in heads, each little tubular corolla resting in a short, tubular calyx. It would lead me to give you some description of the differences found in the Papilionaceous flowers, but our road leads us into the SILENT WAY.

Lucretia P. Hale.

Ο

A TENNESSEE FARM-HOUSE.

Na cold morning of last December, I started on horseback from Corinth, in Mississippi, to visit the battle-field of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, in Tennessee. Crossing the State line, I fell in with a young fellow wearing a flapping gray blanket and riding a mule. On making his acquaintance, I learned that his name was Zeek, and that he lived on the western edge of the battle-field, to which he promised to guide me if I would go home with him to his father's house.

At about two o'clock, after a ride of twenty miles, we forded Owl Creek, a narrow, muddy stream. Zeek's home was in view from the farther bank, — a log-house, with the usual great opening through the middle, — situated on the edge of a pleasant oak-grove strewn with rustling leaves, and enclosed, with its yard and out-houses, by a Virginia rail-fence.

"Alight!" said Zeek, dismounting.

We were met inside the gate by a sister of the young man, a girl of fif teen, in a native Bloomer dress that fell just below the knees. As I entered the space between the two divisions of the house, I noticed that doors on both sides were open, one leading to the kitchen, where there was a great fire, and the other to the sitting-room, where there was another great fire, in large old-fashioned fireplaces.

Zeek took me into the sitting-room, and introduced me to his mother. There were two beds in the back corners of the room. The uncovered floor was of oak; the naked walls were of plain hewn logs; the sleepers and rough boards of the chamber floor constituted the ceiling. There were clothes drying on a pole stretched across the room, and hanks of dyed cotton thread on a bayonet thrust into a chink of the chimney. Cold as the day was, the door by which we entered was never shut, and sometimes another door was open, letting the wintry wind sweep through the house.