CHAPTER II.

I COME, I come! You have called me long,
I come o'er the mountains with light and song.
You may trace my steps o'er the wakening earth,
By the winds which tell of the violet's birth:
By the primrose stars in the shadowy grass,
By the green leaves opening as I pass.

MRS. HEMANS.

"CAN anything be more dull, more dreary, or more monotonous, than this morning walk that we are doomed to?" asked Dora, by the way of opening the conversation, as the school-room party left the house together a few days after Miss Vaughan's arrival. "How cold, dirty, and disagreeable it is; nothing to be seen, and no object in view but to get back again, and at the end of two long hours. Rainy weather is dull enough; but really I would rather be shut up in the house all day, than walk out in the country at this time of the year: one can read and amuse one's self within doors."

Miss Vaughan appeared to differ very much from this openly declared opinion of Dora's, though she did not contradict her; her look was cheerful and amused; she chatted gaily to the shivering children, and shewed them signs of the coming spring, how the leaf-buds were already starting into life, promising that soon the now dreary landscape should put on its beautiful spring garment, when all would be joy and gladness. For some time they walked on at a brisk pace; and gradually the spirits of the little party

seemed to rise with the colour in their cheeks. At length Miss Vaughan stopped to observe something in the hedge. "What are you looking at, Miss Vaughan? There are no flowers out yet, I am sure."

find a

"Do not be too sure, Mary, for I think we may great many if we look for them; here is one that has already ceased blowing, and spent the greater part of its little life; it is called Whitlow Grass; it will soon shed its seed, and wither away."

"How early it must have bloomed; what sort of flower was it? I don't think I ever saw it."

"It was such an humble little flower, that you would hardly see it without looking for it; it blossoms in February and March: but many trees, as well as plants, are in seed now. Mary, look at that Elm; what do you see on it?"

"I see a number of young leaves upon it, but I see nothing like seed."

"Those green plates hanging from the bough are not leaves, Mary, they are the seed vessels of the tree; in the centre of them lies the seed itself: in a very few days the wind will scatter them all away, and then the leaflets will appear; they will be of a brighter and darker green than

these seed vessels."

"But how will the seeds be produced? There were no flowers on the tree before."

"O yes, the elm trees were covered with purple flowers more than a month ago; I wonder you did not observe them."

At this moment Fanny came running up with a joyful

expression. "Look," she said, "I have found a Forgetme-not."

"No, my love, the Forget-me-not never makes its appearance till summer comes. That little light blue flower is one of the numerous family of the Speedwells: it is called Ivy-leafed Speedwell, because its leaves are shaped like those of the Ivy. There is a great variety of these little blue flowers; and people not much acquainted with plants, are apt to call them all Forget-me-nots very erroneously. The true Forget-me-not is an aquatic plant; that is, it grows only in water, or in very marshy ground. It is distinguished from the Speedwell family by its long narrow leaves, which have obtained for it the name of Mouse's-ear, or Scorpion-grass."

"And is there a family of Mouse's-ear, too, like the Speedwells?"

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Yes; the Forget-me-not is one of a family, but it is a much smaller family than that of the Speedwells: of the latter there are no less than eighteen species, and of the former only eight. The one which much resembles the true Forget-me-not is a little brilliant blue flower, that blows in fields late in the summer; the only perceptible difference being, that it is much smaller: it is called the Field Forgetme-not. I should like to teach you their Latin names, which would help you to distinguish the different species better than the English ones, but I am afraid of puzzling your memory too much; still I think you may try and remember that Myosotis is the botanical name for the Scorpion-grass genus (or family), and Veronica for that of the Speedwells."

Myosotis and Veronica. Yes, I am sure we can remember that Myosotis sounds like mouse, so we shall know that that stands for the Mouse-ear family; and Veronica is the family name of my dear little blue flower, and its own particular name is Speedwell. Do you know I am almost sorry that it is not 'Forget-me-not,' because that is so pretty; I don't like 'Speedwell' near so well."

"I have sometimes," said Miss Vaughan, "heard it called Eyebright, a name which seems to suit it very well, but which does not belong to it any more than Forget-menot. Ebenezer Elliott, who has written a poem called the 'Excursion,' has fallen into this mistake, for he evidently alludes to the Speedwell when he says

'Blue Eyebright! loveliest flower of all that grow

In flower-loved England! Flower, whose hedge-side gaze
Is like an infant's! What heart doth not know
Thee, clustered smiler of the bank! where plays
The sunbeam with the emerald snake, and strays
The dazzling rill, companion of the road
Which the lone bard most loveth, in the days

When hope and love are young? O come abroad,

Blue Eyebright, and this rill shall woo thee with an ode?

Now the real Eyebright, or Euphrasia, as it is called, is not a hedge flower. It grows generally in plains, in a chalky soil, or on the edges of cliffs."

"So, then," said Mary, "poets are not always botanists.” "No; but I think they ought to be. It seems a pity that those pretty lines should be spoiled by a mistake.”

They were now passing under an avenue of Oaks, on one side of which was a copse, thickly strewn with dead leaves.

Miss Vaughan remarked, "How pleasant it would soon

be to wander there, and what a number of flowers they would find, when the leaves on the ground were gone." "What will become of them?" asked Fanny.

Many of them will rot and mix with the soil, or be grown over with moss; but the greater number will be blown away by the wind into ditches and hollow places, where they will crumble away by degrees, and form a rich and valuable manure, which will nourish the roots of the trees, and send up sap into their trunks to form fresh leaves for the next summer."

"Then the new leaves of one year are actually made out of the old leaves the year before."

"Yes, they are produced from them; and that is a deep thought, Mary. Nothing that has once been made is ever destroyed. When it dies away, the elements that composed it still exist somewhere: they are changed only to appear again in some new form. To me this has always seemed one of the strongest of natural grounds for believing in the immortality of the soul. We know that our bodies, when they are placed in the ground, do not utterly perish; their elements, like those of the plants, must still exist under some form somewhere. How unlikely, then, that the spirit that ennobles and animates the senseless clay-the thinking part of us—should be the only part to perish. We know, of course, because we have it on God's own word, that our souls will never die; but I mean, that also without this revelation we might almost know it, from observing the operations of nature."

"And that is what is meant by natural religion, is it not?" asked Dora.