THE CHINESE PRIMROSE.

Why is this flower so favoured and caressed?
Is it because it comes from foreign climes
To bloom for us in native beauty dressed?
Or is it that its name familiar chimes
With sympathies, if not inborn, yet sown
In simple hearts, in childhood's happy days,
And thus in each returning spring have grown,
As the pale Primrose daily met our gaze?

How shall we answer these questions? The merits and beauty of this native of the East undoubtedly claim our consideration and admiration. A few years ago the number of flowers which were available in the first month of the year, as ornaments to our dwelling-rooms, was very limited, confined nearly, if not altogether, to bulbous-rooted plants, as the Hyacinth and the Crocus. It is still small, but it was a great gain when the Chinese Primrose was cultivated so extensively as to place it within the reach of all who derive gratification from the presence of flowers in their windows, or set here and there in their apartments. Thousands who had not the skill, nor the means, nor the time, to rear and tend them, were, for a few pence, able to possess a bushy plant

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with a profuse bloom for a long period, of various delicate hues. It was found very patient too, for it needed not to be placed in the window, to catch each ray of light which finds its way to us in the dark days, but thrived as well in a quiet corner of a room most remote from that locality. All it required was a sufficiency of water, yet never given in excess, to keep it in a healthy condition. And the plant will bear our milder winters in the open air when set in shaded spots, where it is not subjected to the cold blasts of wintry winds.

But the Chinese Primrose has beauty to recommend it. The plant itself is of a pleasing form, and the prolific umbel of flowers is really an object to be admired, not only on account of its graceful appearance, but also on account of the simple beauty of each single flower. Its natural colour is pink, but it varies from a pale and somewhat rosy lilac to a deep reddish-pink, and it is beautiful in each gradation of colour. There are also purple and white varieties, and thus we are enabled to have a great diversity of colour in a flower whose beauty is rendered the more attractive by its contrast in form with the stiff but rich-coloured petals of the Crocus, and the wax-like rigidity of the invaluable and favourite Hyacinth.

We cannot, however, allow that all the favour which has been bestowed upon the Chinese Primrose is to be attributed solely to its merits and beauty. Deprived of the adjective, we should still feel a deep interest in the flower, if our attention were called to it as a Primrose blooming early in January. True, we have seen in our own garden, on one of the most luxu