indebtedness is increased by the short time during which we have received plants from Japan. We had been receiving plants for more than two hundred and fifty years from the great continent of America, before our gardens had one plant from the comparatively small islands of Japan; and yet it is not too much to say that Japan has left a greater mark on the ornamental character of our gardens than America. And I should also have liked to say something on the climatic conditions of Japan, which have enabled it to do so much for English gardens; and on the curious connection between the flora of Japan and North America -but space forbids.

In one respect Japan and England come very near together. We pride ourselves on our gardens, and call ourselves as a nation lovers of gardens and flowers. Japan is a nation of gardeners, and every man, woman, and child is passionately fond of flowers; with them gardening is a religion. We may then associate ourselves with them as brother-craftsmen, and I shall not offend against the laws of strict neutrality if I end my paper by the wish that my brother-craftsmen in Japan may soon have the blessing of an honourable and lasting peace in which they may again quietly exercise their skill in the cultivation of beautiful flowers, to their great delight and profit and to our great advantage.

H. N. ELLACOMBE.

THE LITTLE GIRL.

To queen it by virtue of her latent womanhood-to evoke the tenderest chivalry, the most poignant affection-to touch with tiny fingers the heart-strings that lie too deep for tears, these are the prerogatives of the European girl-child. The Oriental one is on a very different footing, a drug in the market, a waste product not seldom destroyed at birth to obliterate the discredit of her luckless mother. But in the West, and in England especially, there is no heart but succumbs to that ethereal charm from which nothing can vitally detract. The great blue eyes of one child hold you captive, though her kisses be glutinous with toffee; the confiding hand of another throws you into a fervour of protective love, though tears bedaub her lovely pink and white. (The muddiness of infant tears is astounding.) The small girl is set apart from the beginning on a pinnacle of devotion. She may punch her little brother's head, but it will go hard with him should he retaliate. She may impel her nurse to the verge of sheer frenzy with the vagaries of her caprice: what then? Punishment rolls off her like thistledown: threats go in at one shell-ear and out at another. Her airy irrelevance flouts the heavy artillery of a parental lecture, and the lecturer flounders painfully after that butterfly irresponsibility which none shall hope to overtake. Theoretically, she is to be kept in lavender all her days she need never jostle with the clumsy facts of life. The serious attention to a future career which must eventually be expected of her masculine contemporaries need trouble her no whit. Too often, however, an adventurous nature reverses this condition, and she cherishes very secretly a thousand gallant purposes. Conjoined with her brother in boyish sports and plans, her nimble wit outruns his laggard reason, and she will face unmoved the emergency whereat he pales and flinches. If, on the other hand, she be a dreamer buried in books, the salient necessities of life become irksome to her. It is intolerable that one should be called away to tea from the very apex and crisis of a fairy tale; and the fiat of a change of raiment may throw her into spasms of inarticulate wrath. Should she early fall into the meshes of ambition, Heaven help her! It will trip her up at

every turn. Better for her that the treasures of her enthusiasm be expended upon the doll and all that pertains to it. The doll is the natural safety-valve for one's emotions; also one can punish it most satisfactorily when the world goes awry. Sometimes, indeed, its nose is put out of joint by its living prototype. Margaret, aged six, entered her kindergarten after many days' absence, with so effulgent a face as must kindle curiosity in the dullest. 'Yes, I've had a bad cough and cold,' she explained, 'I had to stay at home. But what luxury do you think I had yesterday?' The mistress suggested grapes, jujubes, black-currant jelly. 'No,' says Margaret, clasping ecstatic hands, 'a BABY!' She jingled two pennies in her pocket, and was seen, homeward-bound, to emerge from the toyshop with a pink paper fan as an offering to the new divinity.

It is not easy, as a rule, to grow intimately acquainted with the little girl. She is elusive, diffident, reserved. The little boy comes half-way to meet your advances, outpouring his confidence with the frankest friendliness. You know where to have him; you know that certain subjects are bound to find his heart. But his sister remains always more or less a terra incognita—even in her most expansive moments. Her reserve deepens as her legs lengthen; and the dimpled little dumpling of three, who would have toddled to you with her most cherished secrets, becomes at nine a stand-offish abstracted creature, irresponsive to the adroitest overtures, and apparently sharing no common ground of interest with you. Even the madcap tomboy child, the hoyden in miniature,

Swift, lithe, plastical,
High-fantastical,
In feats gymnastical
Enthusiastical,

evades your mental grip with the most vexatious agility, and barricades herself suddenly behind glaciers of aloofness. This tendency to the unexpected is one of the little girl's chief charms, but it is strangely disconcerting none the less, the result being that you don't get no forrarder' with her. La donna è mobile to such an extent that I doubt if the most sedulous mother can keep pace with all her moods.

'The happiest women,' says George Eliot, 'like the happiest nations, have no history,' and this is especially true of little girls. No sunshine of after years can quite efface the memories of a

dreary, clouded childhood. No liberty of happiness ever does away with that bitter blinding sense of injustice which rankles so cruelly in the mind of a sensitive child ill-governed. Consciously or unconsciously, all life takes its colouring from one's first years. The little girls of great fiction are all predestined to storm and stress. The sole reason of your introduction to them as children is to prepare the way for their subsequent development into victims of outrageous fortune. The little Consuelo, dangling her bare feet into the lagoon water as she threads her fiori di mare; the small rebellious Maggie Tulliver, shearing her black unruly locks; the tiny coquette Trix Esmond, always alert to 'play off little graces' for the ensnarement of a stranger; Lorna Doone among her savage captors; Lyndall in the Story of an African Farm; Elsie Venner shackled by mysterious fatethese are typical specimens of the child for whom the future is inconceivable, save as a via dolorosa.

Oddly enough, it is always brunettes who are thus revealed to us in young childhood. I cannot recall a single instance of blonde beauty similarly depicted. Perhaps the fair, lymphatic type is less susceptible of ultimate evolution into the strenuous and much-enduring creature of circumstance, the true heroic woman. The 'icily regular, faultlessly null' mould of a Griselda Grantly is but the natural outcome of that virtuous immaculate anomaly, the angel in a bib'; and to such serene pre-eminence the dark impulsive child, with her countless little rages and remorses, can never hope to attain. But who shall say which is the dearer, the 'wee croodlin' doo,' cuddlesome, timid, rarely in disgrace, exquisite with the ephemeral tints of spring's own white and gold, pale blue and rose; or the tumultuous high-spirited gipsy-faced child, brown as Mother Earth, excitable as the sea, blown about by every wind of emotion? The first, it may be, appeals more strongly to the guardian paternal instinct, and to that unwritten Anglo-Saxon law which decrees that 'child' and 'fair' shall usually be synonymous. The second courts the yearning anxieties of mother-love; for the mother rejoices to be spent on the object demanding most of her in pain and prayer. The greater the cost, the higher the value. I wager you will find she loves her naughtiest child the best.

From whole regions of the world's romance, the little girl is entirely absent. In the novel of adventure she plays no part. What should she do among the drawing of swords, the rattle of

halyards, and tramp of horses? Scott, Stevenson, Dumas, Kingsley, Meredith, Kipling-to name only half a dozen-have ignored her completely. Whenever she figures in fiction at all, it is either for the ultra-pathetic destiny of early death—as in the case of Dickens's Little Nell'-or for the chivalric development of some stripling-this you will find in many modern novels-who, having frolicked with her in childhood, weds her, after apparently insurmountable obstacles, on the last page but one. Her third raison d'être is that already alluded to-the inevitable tragedy lying in wait for her. There is one immortal child, however, who fits in with none of the foregoing conditions: the most popular, the most widely quoted child that ever was invented. Even her obsolete dress of the late 'Sixties, her tightly drawn-back straight hair, white stockings, little prim pocketed apron (for you can never dissociate her from Tenniel's illustrations), fail to tarnish the perennial attractiveness of 'Lewis Carroll's' Alice. But I gather that Lewis Carroll,' like Ruskin, laboured under a chronic infatuation for little girls.

A new era of loveliness dawned for our heroine with Kate Greenaway's drawings. The quaint picturesquenesses of the present day, who glance at us demurely beneath their little furred hoods, or out of their blossom-like sun-bonnets, are very different externally from the crinoletted be-trousered children whom our mothers would fain forget. Yet childhood has never forgone its implicit sweetnesses-no, not when most disguised in monstrous apparel, most cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd by regulations, etiquettes, and formalities. The little girl of Charles I., peeping forth in Vandyke's picture through her stiff bondage of attire, is essentially the same as the dainty rogues in porcelain who smile at us from the canvases of Sir Joshua. The children of bygone centuries, however, were less happy than ours in one particular. Their childhood was curtailed as far as possible: it was accounted a blemish, to be outgrown with haste. The blessed nursery years were hurried through, and the joyful possibilities of play subordinated to maturer studies-studies of books and men, especially the latter. Fifteen was an ordinary marriageable age. Hence we find a precocity of eroticism among the children of the eighteenth century, which is absolutely repugnant to modern taste, and which finds no modern parallel except in isolated instances and among the lower classes. Childhood is now a happier period because of its longer duration, and from the