of us her appearance suggested that some frog had acquired the beak of a bird and arboreal habits! This fancy-fact led us to comment on the imputed relationship, in paleozoic time, between bird and reptile. (I hope the thrush did n't understand what we said!)

A needle in a haymow has its analogue, — a wren in a brush heap. How did I chance to see the brown sprite among the brown twigs? Perhaps there was a drawing magnetism in that cunning bright eye. The wren's behavior at first was crisp and disputatious; then there was a trill so sweetly affable, I felt it like an adroit flattery; then, as if having communicated himself too far to a stranger, and growing cautious, he kept his opinions to himself, while he nimbly thridded the meshes of the brush heap.

At this time, the plenitude and festivity of life in the world of nature are everywhere beheld, felt, and heard. The sweet census of existence is every moment swelled, and new participants of the universal joy seem hurrying upon the stage, to play over again the drama, a thousand thousand times played, though by other individuals, in the long evolution of nature. I think of those delicious lines of Keats on the waking of Adonis :

:

A breezy day. Phoebe, from the top of the great maple by the bridge, suits her call to the airy gayety of the time, for it is, "breezy! breezy! breezy! ever and anon, while in the interval I know that she darts some yard's length from her perch, then back again, and that in consequence there is one less ephemeral, gauzy-winged creature to celebrate Midsummer Day.

sunshine and shadow, as they pass in rapid succession over the country! They move from west to east. A belt of woodland against the western sky suddenly darkens as the sailing clouds come over, and draws a purple hood over its fresh summer green. The shadow flows on to the brim of the full meadow next the woods, then moves forward; the wonderful undulations of golden-green and purple-green fleeting over the landscape are like the stratified hues I have noticed in the perspective of the Lake. By the time the moving shadow, has reached my standpoint the distant woodland flashes into clear sunlight, here and there flinging out its live banners.

The dandelion's hoary globe of pappus might be taken as a symbol of wisdom, of gray hairs and severe musing, in the midst of the boon season. At some distance a company of these gray heads glitter in the sunshine, as though in that spot were a garden of flowers. A ball of dandelion down raised just above the level of the grass seems about to go bounding over its velvety surface, like soap bubbles that children toss in a shawl. It glitters in the sunshine, but at evening shines as if with a pale light of its own, a humble student lamp in the grass.

The dandelion shows no more
The sunny disk she sometime bore,
Wherein Apolio might behold
His imaged face in finest gold;
But on the grass she bows her down,
And stoops, to gain a silver crown,
An astral circlet gleaming bright,
Yet soft as snow, as airy-light!
And now her head she slowly lifts,
And by the wind spreads subtile gifts.
Still lack we wit to mark, or heed,
How, cabined in the drifting seed,
Through the wide ways of heaven flee
The light hopes of the year to be.

the blossom, whose odor resembles that of the lily of the valley. Very curious is the structure of the flower itself. The green corolla, at first tightly fitted around the stamens, is next borne upon their tops, whence it is finally thrust off, like a cap doffed upon a spear, from which it is dropped to the ground.

The flower of the timothy, or herd's grass, is very beautiful, in these fresh mornings lavish of dew. The solid spike set with misty rays held out on all sides at perfect poise is, as it were, a rude stock or holder wherein are thrust so many gracilent, sprite-haunted blossoms. But how soon departing! Whether from the increasing heat of the day, or because their allotted time is brief, when I looked for them at noon yesterday, I found in their place only drooping yellow chaff clinging to the spike. This change affected me more than might the disappearance of a more obvious beauty of florescence, seeming in some special way to emphasize the fugaciousness of the season. But this morning there was a fresh relay of blossoms balancing their precious panniers of pollen dust around the sturdy spike, as their predecessors of yesterday had done.

A BOOK IN THE RUNNING BROOK.

I'll pluck a tablet from the slaty ledge,
A

pen I'll carve me of the straightest sedge, Then dip it in the bright loquacious brook; And so I'll write a brief riparian book.

Beyond that grove of reeds the sunbeams sink
Into the polished stream, and make it wink
With dazzling eyebeams; and just here it burns
An hundred sunglasses; and yonder earns
Pactolean honors, a pure golden stream
That up its bank reflects a wealthy gleam.
Still further on, what silvery lightnings glance
Where the spent ripples fall into a trance,
As though a sultrier air upon them rested!
Those silvery flashes are the fish white-breasted;
There do they leap in wavy tournament,
A moment seen, then with the water blent.

A willow by the curving stream I see, About to leave the habit of a tree,

us.

A good firefly night, warm, still, and dark. I think the firefly must resent brilliancy in the heavens that puts out its own luminary. Gleaming and darkling, coming and going, this least of the wandering stars or planets has its dark side, which at times is turned towards The butterfly to the day, the firefly to the night; the one in the livery of the sun and the Orient, the other clothed upon with the lustre of the stars! In some degree, like the maid from the south of Ireland who serves my friends, I too am afraid of the "loights in the grass." Any time, I think, they may become "brave translunary things," and sail away beyond the range of the fly that sips nectar from the cup of the gods, in yonder constellated field.

The other evening, bringing home a handful of flowers from S- -'s garden (O lavendered memory of how many such cullings in the dewy dusk, for me!), I was followed, and the flowers were purloined of their sweets, by a great night

moth, a true sphinx with a riddle, provoking us to ask if it be not the longsought connecting link between bird and insect! This elfin creature hovered about the flowers with a humming-bird's poise, motion, and musical accompaniment, using its siphon-like proboscis to sound the honey depths of the flowers. I noticed that, although it occasionally stopped to consider the roses, it invariably returned to its favorite honeysuckle. The long proboscis, or feeder, coiled like a watchspring, when not in use, perhaps three inches in length, and bent in the middle at a right angle, is scarcely to be seen in the dusk of evening; hence the insect appears to hover quite aloof from the flower, and to woo it delicately rather than to rifle its treasure. The eyes of the insect are two rubies, and the whirring wings must be strong to bear up the weight of its gross body. It was this tidbit which a late robin was anxious to secure, the other evening; but the morsel proved unmanageable or distasteful, for the bird soon dropped it, and went up to his sleeping-chamber in the old maple.

A GARDEN OF THE PAST.

ΤΟ

I am the night-moth Memory. I sleep all through the day; At evening, to the Garden

I take my murmuring way.

Of old, above the Garden

Hung Ariadne's Crown; And, filtered by the starlight,

The gradual dew came down.

The white flowers, in the darkness,
With pale star-lustre shone ;
The dark flowers by the fragrance
And soft flower-touch were known.

There no new flower shall open,
No blooming flower decline.
I am the night-moth Memory;
The Garden, it is thine!

But art thou in the Garden?

A spirit fills the place;

Its mute voice- is it thy voice? Its veiled face, thy face?

The country and the city are antipodal in this: that as we very fitly speak of the "dead of winter in the country, we might with equal propriety of description speak of the "dead of summer " in the city. In this season, urban aridity and desolateness everywhere stamp themselves upon the mind of the late delayer within walled-town limits. The very houses that befriended us in the winter are now closed, blinded, barricaded by the spirit of inhospitality, seeming to say as we pass by, "I know you not." In the meshes of the wistaria, that one flower of romance peculiar to the metropolis, like the moonlighted face of a Juliet leaning in expectance from her leafy balcony, — there now remains but an occasional withering cluster of blossoms, pale indeed from the heat, but more from the dust. infrequent trees that in spring evinced a pathetic cheerfulness, striving, like true philanthropists of nature, to make an oasis of greenness for dwellers in the waste places of brick and stone, have lost all hope and purpose; and, as if desirous of autumn, the very leaves seem to droop and cling about their stems. The sole of the foot aches from concussion with the heated pavement. That curiously distancing effect produced to the eye by hot air in motion, which in the country makes the far harvest fields seem yet farther, is even more distinctly experienced in the town. It is a Sahara distance from one side of the square to the other, an eye-narrowing, shimmering perspective of sunshine, dust, and drought. How is it to be crossed?

The

This afternoon I have my chair and book under the apple-tree, - a book of travels. Meanwhile, whenever I look up, or rather down, from its pages, I note other Excursions: those of a discontented beetle, a gorgeous creature, with bronze breastplate and peacock-green surtout. He has traveled I know not how many parasangs (I take him to be a Persian),

perhaps a yard; and now back again he comes, apparently dissatisfied, toiling painfully over small sticks and rough grains of earth. He has now to mount a hill some three inches high. Ah, tedious effort! Now he disappears on the other side; now reappears, and starts on another fruitless vagabondage.

The dropping of the early-ripe apple marks a distinct stage in the summer's advancement. As I look up into the heavily laden tree, it is easy to fancy that the apples are actually crowding one another on the thickset branch, silently persevering as if with some mutual idea of decimation. They are like an overcrowded population, or like school urchins

on a bench, who push one another until some one falls off.

Early this morning, looking out at the eastern heavens, it was a surprise to see our old acquaintances of the winter evening, the Pleiades, Orion, Taurus. But no cold sparkle of the jewels in Orion's belt, no gleam from the eyes of Taurus. Instead, the air being smoky and obscure, the stars of these constellations, forever associated with the frosts of winter as they are, seemed now more like hot coals, or the "seeds of fire" seen in a bed of ashes or through a cloud of sultry smoke. The Earth slept well at this hour, slept as though she had been sleeping from old time. I heard the chirping of the crickets, regular, monotonous, as though it were the pulse-beat of the air itself. The comfortable sleepy dark, like some feline sleeper, seemed to be purring with the muffled sonorous vibrations that pervaded the dim world. The few actually waking sounds in nature, the occasional cockcrow or lowing of cattle, were either absorbed by the dull air, or so modified as to seem like distant strains of music.

Nothing could be finer than the great domes of ethereal marble and agate that, during these hot days, are built up from

the southern horizon. I don't know how this village below is affected, generally, by the sight of that city yonder; but, for me, the heavens have been haunted, full of presences, Olympian deities, Parthenon sculptures, friezes illustrating Homer. When an occasional heat-lightning is sent across these thunderheads, the flash reveals what to the fancy might be the crimson-hung interior of a palace or the glow of red lamps in a shrine. Sometimes the entire mass of such cloudstructures rises halfway to the zenith, glittering like a true sun-kissed mountain; a great white beacon, the pillar of cloud by day, for a sign and guidance. Sometimes the sun shining behind the cumulus gives it a flashing border of light so intense as to be almost intolerable to the

eye; suggesting that a bolt of lightning has been arrested on its passage through the billowy gulf, and there made permanent. These are the tantalizing clouds of other people's rain, specious and magnificent, but fruitless to our parched fields; and yet the favored land toward the south, where it has been raining, cannot keep all nature's bounty to itself. The moist rumor flies, and the air is temporarily sweetened and freshened for us by reason of the showers that have fallen elsewhere.

The summer begins to crisp and shrivel up. The earth itself seems about to be destroyed and sifted, as fine dust, into the empyrean. A wagon on the country road, half seen in clouds of dust, reproduces, in monochrome, the child's memory of Biblical pictures portraying Elijah in his chariot enveloped in swathings of flame. Everywhere in nature there is a painful sense of oppression,the oppression of unshed tears.

What thing, most bitter in a bitter world, Is also sweetest? Child of Sorrow, speak! "It is the sea-salt drop that lies impearled, Dew on the heart, the tear upon the cheek!"

At last the long-wished-for rain. It came in the early morning; at first desultorily, doubtfully, as though it had nearly forgotten its own methods. It culminated in a brisk, rattling shower, falling away in a most delicious diminuendo, single threads of its weft of sound being broken one by one, and one by one, till not even a raveling remained. Then were heard the voices of the chief rain-lovers among the birds, the 'robin, the wren, and the summer yellowbird. And so the fresh day was ushered in, and so looked upon a world from which all tan and dust freckles had been washed away.

Edith M. Thomas.

from the shores of the Northern Ocean carried terror along the coasts of Europe and the Mediterranean, and as far inland as their light keels could enter. After the great wars of the French Revolution and the battle of Algiers, when Lord Exmouth had won his renown and his position had been attained, kinship with him was claimed by a family still residing in Normandy, where the name was spelled "Pelleu." Proof of common origin was offered, not only in the name, but also in the coats of arms.

In England, the Pellew family was