acuminate, alternate leaves on long petioles. They are serrate with rounded teeth, larger than in any other species. The stipules vary from broad to narrow lanceolate. The flowers spring from the axils of the upper leaves on slender peduncles from one to three inches long. The petals are rounded, of a pale tint above, and violet beneath. The lateral ones are bearded and the spur is short. This is our largest species reaching sometimes the height of nearly two feet.

One of the most distinct species is the LONG SPURRED or BEAKED VIOLET (V. rostrata Pursh). It is distinguished at once by its remarkably long spur, which is sometimes twice the length of the petals. The general aspect is that of a small Canadensis, from which it differs in the spur and the fringed stipules, cut into slender, very narrow teeth at the base. The leaves are ovate, cordate, sometimes acuminate and bluntly toothed, on long petioles. The flowers are rather large, pale, and veined, with bluntly pointed petals without a beard. The spur is more than half an inch long, including the anther spurs, which are proportionately increased. The species is nowhere common, but it is found from Canada to Virginia, and westward to Ohio. It grows on moist, shady, rocky hill-sides.

The most abundant of the caulescent forms is the SPREADING VIOLET (V. Muhlenbergii, Torr.), which grows in moist, low woods. It sends out numerous stems from four to six inches long, which spread in every direction over the ground, sometimes resting on it and becoming geniculated. The leaves are small, round and heart-shaped; lower ones have long petioles with their lobes curling inwards in the manner of the cucullata. The stipules are large and, like the last, cut into laciniate teeth. The flowers are of medium size, light blue, and marked with pale lines,

the

with a spur about half as long as the petals. According to Torrey and Gray, this is the V. debilis of Pursh and Bigelow, but not of Michaux.

There is another species, nearly related to this, which grows westward and southward, and has been in a few instances found in our borders, but it is not so common as to be familiar even to those who seek for our floral varieties. It is the PALE VIOLET (V. striata Ait). It is erect, with leaves pointed and very regularly serrate, with rounded teeth and large stipules, cut-toothed like the garden species. The flowers are on long peduncles, of a very light yellow color, with prominent veins. Some forms of it approach the Canadensis in habit.

The last species for us to describe is the YELLOW VIOLET (V. pubescens Ait). The stem is from six to twelve inches high, leafless below, giving out three or four broad, heart-shaped, acuminate, serrate leaves at the summit. A single, ovate, obtuse bract springs from the naked portion of the stem and, similar ones accompany each leaf. The lobes are sometimes cucullate. The flowers appear in the axils of the upper leaves on long peduncles with two small, subulate bracts in the middle. They are of medium size, yellow and elegantly striated, with a very short and slightly swollen spur. The whole plant is generally clothed with a soft pubescence, extending to the seed-vessel, which is covered with a woolly down. This is one of the handsomest species, frequenting the woodlands and extending over the whole country. There is a smoother and greener variety to which Schweinitz gave the name of scabriuscula.

The Violets are the type of the order to which they belong, VIOLACEE. There are but two other genera in North America; Solea and Ionidium.

"MY

Y dear sir," said a pale gentleman in a well-fitting black suit, touching my elbow and addressing me abruptly, as I stood looking over the taffrail of the Stonington steamer" My dear sir, never, on any account, buy food of old people, nor practice impositions on cats."

"Why," I answered, laughing, “I don't intend to practice impositions either on cats or men; but I see no reason why edibles vended by an old person, should not be as savory and as properly salable as others."

Especially if you are peddling," continued my new friend, with a smile— "especially if you are peddling. I'll tell you the reason, if you like, and I think it will please you; for there is really a good deal of truth in this advice of mine."

It is a good plan to tolerate all manner of queer self-introductions. I have gathered many singular stories, and much useful information and new truth, from fellow-travellers of easy manners and a cacoëthes loquendi. So I answered that I should be extremely happy to listen to the account which my friend seemed prepared to furnish, whereupon he proceeded to narrate the following:

While I was engaged in the peddling business, ten or fifteen years ago, in the rough country including those portions of Virginia. Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, which are nearest each other, I was in the habit of putting up at a solitary frame house, on the mountains in East Tennessee. It was inhabited by two poor creatures, a man and his wife; old, decrepit, and scarcely able to crawl. They had a small garden, and an enormous tom-cat; in both of which they took very great pride. They raised a little corn, and a few vegetables; but for other housekeeping comforts and necessaries, they depended upon chance passengers; peddlers, emigrants, hunters, &c. The honse was full twenty miles from any other on the road, either way, and the route was extremely rough. How these two feeble old mortals should ever have settled there, or how they should dare to stay so long, I'm sure I can't imagine. Their nearest neighbors used to tell queer stories about the old place, as if it had formerly been the haunt of horse-thieves, negro-stealers, counterfeiters, and that riff-raff of miscel

laneous miscreants that gathers now and then in the West and South; and as if the old man and his old wife had been implicated in many dark deeds, and lived there, by a retributive imprisonment, in the place of their ancient crimes. But of all this, I never saw any indications. I repeatedly passed the night there in safety, even when having property and money to a considerable amount with me. The old folks, to be sure, were 'as cross as two sticks;' but they served me as well as they could. Besides, I was pretty well used to serve myself; and it was one good sign, that they evidently loved their enormous old tom-cat as if it had been an only child. There was only one thing about them which positively displeased me, and that was their terrible avarice. I always paid them well, for they were poor, and needed the money. And the grin and clutch with which they seized the cash, and the gloating delight which they felt, seemingly, even in handling the coins, were ugly and hateful to see.

These

"Well, I always used to put up there, because it was almost necessarily my stopping-place, in getting across one of the twisted combinations of mountain ranges that shut off the western part of North Carolina from Tennessee. visits occurred at irregular intervals during several years, while I was on my circuit in that section of country. I could see that the old couple grew weaker and weaker, and their horrid avarice stronger and stronger. They even used to give way, latterly, to unpleasant demonstrations of maudlin affection at my coming, apparently for no other reason than that they expected handsome payment for my board and lodgings. And the great old cat, though coy at first, ultimately took up a cattish and freaky liking to me; rubbing himself against my boot, purring and looking up and winking slowly at me with his big, green eyes, and even scrambling up into my lap to go to sleep, and lying and kneading and digging his sharp claws into me, as a token of amity, after the fashion of amicable cats.

"I had stopped there one night, towards the end of the summer; and after partaking of an unusually meagre supper and breakfast, departed, leaving the poor old man and his wife mumbling and grinning to each other over a dollar

or two which I gave them, as much in charity as in payment.

"I mused much, as I went, upon the unaccountable change in the behavior of the old cat. He had forgotten all his feline blandishments, and of my caresses and attentions he would none; spitting and swelling up in a manner very ugly to behold, developing his great yellow tail into a cylindrical brush almost as large as his body, arching his back and striking spitefully at me with his claws out at full length, whenever I tried to be friendly. The old woman scolded, and the old man swore; until finally he threw a couple of old boots and a broom at Tom, who evacuated the kitchen, went out and perched on the woodpile, and commenced a horrid and persistent grand solo cat's-concert, calculated to dismay the boldest heart. He wauled and miauled all the evening. He carried on imaginary conflicts with intrusive rivals, and amorous cooings-if one may imagine a tom-cat to coo-with lady-lovers; and he kept me awake nearly all night, in spite of the expenditure of all the missiles I could muster in my crack-lit attic bed

room.

"Nor was he improved in the morning. His unmelodious notes seemed to have been aggravated by his serenadingsinging in the night, you know, is very trying to the voice--and I fancy he must have caught a cold in the head, from sitting undressed on a damp log; for his eyes were considerably inflamed, and were now horribly red and fiery, and his vile crowing and screeching was as hoarse and harsh as a sick Shanghai's. All the time that I was eating my scanty breakfast and harnessing my horse, he sat on his log, kneading and clawing, flirting his abominable tail, and cursing and swearing at me after his cattish sort, with an expression of face perfectly diabolical.

"Upon all these savage demonstrations I meditated a good deal; but at last concluded that they must be charged to the changeable character of the beast. He had first liked me, and then hated me without any particular reason; for I had made no advances towards him, either friendly or hostile. I however considered that I might lightly endure the enmity of a yellow tom-cat, even of the largest dimensions, and so dismissed the matter from my mind.

"A few weeks afterwards, while I was in Nashville, and had nearly sold out my stock, I received a letter from a firm in

Charleston with whom I had transacted some business, requesting me to come immediately thither, and make arrangements to undertake an agency further south, in their employment. I made preparations to start next morning, for their terms were liberal, and at that time I cared little what or where was my occupation, if only I could rove enough. A day's notice would have sufficed me for a voyage around the world.

"As I lay in bed next morning waiting for the breakfast bell, the recollection of old Mr. and Mrs. Graves, and their enormous and fickle pussy came into my mind. The strange behavior of that respectable quadruped had served to impress the occurrences of my last visit deeply on my memory; and by spontaneous mental operation, I now remembered a circumstance which had before escaped me. During my last breakfast at the mountain tavern, the old lady remarked to her husband, as I finished the fag end of a lean scrap of bacon, and a crust of corn bread, that she didn't know what on earth they should do for dinner, unless they should kill Tom; for there wasn't another mouthful of anything on the place. Now, thought I to myself, what could the miserable old creatures do if they should actually get out of provisions? For they could not possibly travel to any other house, in either direction. They had told me that once or twice already they had been reduced to great straits by the non-arrival of any passengers, at times when their own stores had failed. But there was the garden? Yes; but as it happened, there was also nothing in it; for an unprecedentedly long and late drought had that season destroyed nearly all the summer crops, and even many of the forest trees, in the drier parts of that high, mountainous region. And their Western improvidence would prevent them from actual preparation for an emergency of the kind I was contemplating, since 'they had done well enough so far.' Now, I continued, could that frightful yellow cat have foreseen, by some inscrutable animal intuition, such as dogs and horses have often been supposed to possess, that a famine was impending over the household, and that I was consuming the last portion of food, and leaving only useless, inedible specie in return? And was it that foreboding which made him so savage and persistent in his wrath and his vociferations?

"I very soon, however, got rid of these

unpromising speculations in the bustle of breakfast and of preparing for my long ride. For there was no public conveyance by my old route, which, as the shortest, I proposed to take, and having disposed of my team, I purchased a saddle-horse, took provisions and a doublebarrelled pistol, and set out.

"But as I rode along through solitary woods, or on the unfrequented paths among plantations, the odd notions that had perplexed me in the morning unaccountably rose up again in my mind. Suppose the old people should have got entirely out of food? Suppose that rascally old tom-cat did really have the "second sight," and had been shrieking out like a feline and fuscous Cassandra, a true and unregarded prophecy of woe? What a miserable and unhappy end of their lonely, forgotten lives, to starve in their solitary home on the mountains, alone! To feel their impotence, and wait in helpless, hopeless weakness, for passengers who did not come-to see the shadows shorten on the floor in the morning, and lengthen again in the slanting sunbeams of afternoon, and to hear no approaching step-and then suddenly I remembered wild stories of attacks made by cats upon babes or the heipless sick, or even upon unwatched corpses of the dead. I was active and young; yet these horrid fancies clustered continually about me, despite my endeavors to drive them away, and filled me full of foolish fears to approach the solitary frame house. I argued the whole case over and over; and repeatedly and uselessly convicted myself of nervousness, of folly, of silly dreaming. But as soon as the procession of the reasoning had passed by, and even before, up jumped again the pallid ghosts of the mountain couple. At last, quite out of patience, I drove my horse to his utmost capacity; hurrying, since I could do no better, to dispel, by close encounter, and familiar experience of the aged faces and tottering forms of the old man and woman, the uncomfortable phantoms that haunted me, and that crowded and plagued me more and more every hour.

"After several days' hard travel, I approached the old house. I watched the road earnestly for traces of footsteps, or horse or carriage tracks; but I could see only the half-effaced remains of old ones, washed out by rain, or filled with wind-driven dust. Yet this afforded only a faint presumption; and how absurd did the idea seem that two people,

in a habitable house on a public road, should starve in solitude for lack of provision!

"I crossed the summit of a ridge, from which I could look down as from the rim of a basin, upon the bottom and sides of the wide valley in the higher region of the Cumberland Mountains, in the middle of which the old home stood. The low rays of the western sun, in the floods of the thick yellow light which is the peculiar illumination of the middle and latter half of the golden afternoon, poured over all the amphitheatre, and seemed even to concentrate in still and flaming glories upon the bare old house and within the small clearing around it. Utter and doleful silence slept over all the region. The heat was intense; and, neither did breeze stir the woodlands, nor did bird or beast move or speak in the forest. I reined up and looked forward with the indistinct yet intense volition which we exercise when upon the margin of some undetermined revelation, as if a strong and earnest wish might suffice to show us what we desire to know. Slowly and hesitatingly I set forward again. I met none. I saw none but old tracks. I heard nothing except the reduplicating tramp of my weary horse as I urged him on at a quick walk, his panting, the creaking of his accoutrements. Forward, forward; nearer and nearer to the vortex of these most gratuitous and absurd, but now involuntary and almost unendurable terrors of mine.

"I came suddenly out from beneath the shadowing branches of the high forest trees upon the open ground before the house. The hot yellow light struck me almost faint. The doors and windows were closed. Dust and silence possessed all the outer portions of the homestead. The rusty axe lay upon the chips before the door; an old bucket stood upon the steps; a squirrel skittered across the front of the building and ran squeaking into the rickety garden fence; and an inarticulate moaning noise was heard, and something was feebly dropped against the kitchen window from within. Doubtless, that was the voice and the hand of one of the ancient inmates, fallen near the window, while looking in vain, with dim and dimming eyes, for help that did not come.

leaped from the saddle, hastily fastened my horse, snatched the saddle-bags, drew my pistol, for fear of any surprise, and hurried to the window. But quicker yet, I recoiled. That hideous beast, crouched upon the breast of his dead mistress, cowering there, a gaunt and bony fiend, but with red and angry eyes and bloody jaws, recognized me; sprang with renewed and demoniac strength against the dusty window, through which, in a sort of fear to open the door, I had first peered in upon the secrets of the fearful house. In utter abandonment of frantic anger he flung himself, and flew sideways, with impotent and wide extended fangs and talons, and a shrill and direful cry, against the window, so that the thin glass cracked and shivered, and the hateful thing dashed, but for the transparent film, right in my face.

"My momentary glance within showed me that my speculations had been wellfounded. They were co-existent with some fearful chance, or God had chosen to make me an instrument of death to the two wretched old beings there. For if not, should I not have hastened back to them with food on the day I left them last?

"The old man lay dead upon the bed, and his wife upon the floor. * * *

*

* * But such was the debilitating effect of my previous cogitations, and of the recognition and fiendish virulence of the enormous cat, that my courage was utterly shattered. I fired with unsteady hand upon the beast as he lay kicking on the floor; wounded him; fled straightway to my horse, stumbling in sheer blind affright, and strove to unfasten him.

"But awful yells from the imprisoned cat paralyzed my fingers. Again and again the frightful thing sprang against the window. The weak panes shattered; the hateful yellow beast caught upon the broken fragments left in the sash; tore himself, and bled; scrambled furiously through; flew across the narrow yard; and just as I was mounting, as well as my miserable fear would allow me, sprang at me, caught me by the leg and bit and bit, with an agonizing and

malevolent energy which could only have been inspired by fiends; relaxed his hold, and fell dying to the ground.

"In utter and unimaginable rapture of terror, I set spurs to my horse, screamed to him, whipped him frantically; and so fled far away from the ghastly place.

"But the creature had bitten me with poisonous teeth. And ever since, he is close behind me, and every little while he yells and screams in my ears until I rave. I won't bear it any longer," screamed my gentlemanly friend, looking quickly behind him, and then bending upon me wild eyes, whose increasingly unsteady glitter I had uneasily marked during all the latter portion of this incoherent story "There he is again!

Don't you see him? He'll bite you, too! Let's jump overboard; he can't get us there!"

And before I could do more than cry out once, he gripped me, lifted me from the deck, and sprung with me, out and down into the white shadowy horror of boiling foam that hissed and gurgled, and wallowed, in the twilight under the great steamer's stern.

The cold water awakened me. I lay floundering on the state-room floor, amalgamated with a broken basin and pitcher, the water thence proceeding, a chair, my trunk and my boots. And a baby was squalling fearfully in the next stateroom, not a foot from the berth where I had been sleeping. The vehement shouts of this innocent had furnished the squalls of the cat, around which, as a nucleus, the other circumstances of my dream had grouped themselves, in the rapid crystalization of spontaneous mental action.

"Hence, we view" that

1. Lunatics generalize upon insufficient deductions.

2. Lunatics should not travel unrestrained in public conveyances.

3. Babies should not travel at all in public conveyances, unless they (the babies) are hermetically sealed.