G

I

desirous to have children in its grasp. have shivered as I looked at it, and tried to imagine what it would be to get into its embrace. On this Sunday it seemed a monster reposing ere it went to work further cruelties. It fascinated me. I had to look.

You wise young people of the present day will laugh at this, and say, How foolish! You should have known it was only a big black wheel. Well, perhaps I should; but you must make allowance for me by remembering I was not very old, and I had always lived in the country. Then, books were not so numerous as they are now, so I had to draw on my own imagination for amusement by making my own story books and fairy tales out of such materials as the river, mountain, and old mill. You would laugh still more at me were I to tell you about the deep dark pools of the river, and the curious inhabitants I got myself to believe lived there. For fear you should laugh I will return to the mill.

The miller and the mill were great favourites of mine. I put them together because they seemed part and parcel of each other. When I came to see them on week days, I would often find the miller standing at a low door-way with his hands in his pockets. His thick black hair powdered white with flour. His light clothes made still a lighter colour from the same cause. Such a comfortable looking man, with a cheery way of speaking to everyone. Before the mill door carts would be standing loading or unloading sacks. In open lofts piles of sacks well filled could be seen. A sweet floury smell pervaded the whole place, very suggestive to hungry youngsters of hot cakes. How we wished the mill turned them out ready baked!

But on this Sunday everything looked different. The miller sat in the door of his cottage, hard by, dressed in his church-going suit, dancing his baby on his knee. The wheel was quiet. The river was off on holiday, with nothing to do but play. Troops of children might be scen climbing the moss-covered steps leading to the loft where our school was to be held. It was a

I wish I could make you see how pretty the picture was our teacher had before him that evening. The long low loft with its heavy beams coloured a dark brown with age. The white walls. The bright dresses and faces of the children. The evening sun making a sort of glory round the head of some of them. It was very pretty. Mr Glentworth thought so. He stood some time looking at it. Then he opened with prayer. Our lesson was Christ receiving little children. We were taught that evening, in a way we never forgot, the children's place in the kingdom-near to Jesus. So, ever since, that story seems associated with sunshine and all things sweet and lovely. The surroundings and the time seemed suited to it, and we got closer to the children's Friend than we had ever got before. It was good to know we had a right to be there. The words seemed almost new to us: 'But, when Jesus saw it, He was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.' Christ wanted us. How strange! Sometimes we had felt as though no one wanted us much, as though we were more in the way than anything else; and now we knew for certain Christ wanted

S

Consider the Lilies.

TO YOUNG LOVERS OF FLOWERS.

You have a love for flowers? Nay, one does not ask. Some paradise of daisies all youth has known.

Nellie, your lap was full of them, when the wind blew your hat into the brook, and you had no hand free to save it, so let it flood down into the sea.

And the little brother bent the windflowers with almost rueful pity. He crushed three white blossoms at each step as he went to seek his rabbit in the fern.

Did he find his rabbit? Pretty thing, it also loved the flowers, and felt the cool happiness of a bed among the long green leaves.

These papers are to tell you of the homes of the sweet things that grow-of their pretty wants and ways-of their loves and also of their hates.

For flowers have loves and hates-choices, aspirations and contents-of which you may make life-long study, yet never know all.

Men had not lived long on this lovely earth among the flowers till they began to wonder over them, and note their dainty fashions and forms.

Solomon 'spoke of trees from the cedar in Lebanon even to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall.'

'Flowers of lilies' he carved round the molten sea in the beautiful house of God. And his poetry is full of the symbolic loveliness of roses, lilies, citrons, apples, pomegranates, palms, cedars, aloes, myrrh, and clinging vines.

But the lily, this stately king seemed to love with peculiar love. It was surely his favourite flower, he repeats it so fondly and lingeringly in carved work and song.

Nor any, the youngest little dreamer, can forget whose lips made the same flower sacred, many years after this old king of Israel was gathered to his fathers' sepulchres.

'Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.'

And thus by another human bond, Christ linked His life with ours, and gave voice to the silent beauty of the simple wayside things.

Many centuries earlier the philosophers of Greece turned aside from their lofty studies of human destiny to ponder the life of the plants that grew on their hills and shores. A work on Botany comes down to us from four hundred years before Christ. It was written by Theophrastus, who was a pupil of Aristotle. Pray you, little one, forgive the names. One cannot make them short and sweet. And many such you will learn in the years that are to be.

The name Botany itself also comes from the Greek-from botane, an herb-that is easy to remember.

But do not fear. These pages are to tell the pleasant things-the pretty wants and ways of the flowers. So that when you grow older, and do not fear words many syllabled, you may study the delightful science of which old Theophrastus wrote as much as he knew.

In the first century rose another botanist, Dioscorides, who describes six hundred plants, and nearly at the same time the elder Pliny, who describes one thousand species.

Then for many hundred years no one writes any more about the flowers. They were growing in their sheltered homes, purple, and golden, and blue, and loved all the same, but no one wrote their praise.

The eighth century was drawing very near its close, when at length a new botanist arose-an Arabian, whose name was Avicenna.

Again many silent centuries pass when the flowers bloom unpraised.

Then in 1530 comes Otto Brunsfels, the German, with his history of the plants of Strasburg. And then name after name in France, England, Italy, and Holland. Botany becomes a favourite science; gardens are established for its culture, and professors are teaching it in every university of Europe.

All through the ages, again remember, the flowers were loved and fondled. The

poets could not spare them-the painters neither. The old writers drew them with tender touch round the borders of their gospels and their hymns. And the builders carved them tenderly round the church doorways and pillars. The house-mothers prized and gathered them for the healing virtues that were in them. But the learned men-the men of science-had left them mostly to the care of these.

Now botany received an honoured place, and during all the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rapidly rose in renown.

He to whom its later renown was due more than to any other was Karl Von Linné, better known as Linnaeus.

The father of Linnaeus was a clergyman in the Swedish village of Rashult. You may find Rashult in the province of Smalund, if you should care to look for it. Yet it is but a small village, famous only as the birthplace of the little Karl Von Linné.

While Karl was still a child, his father resolved that he too should be a clergyman. So he made him study many things which the little Karl loved none.

How weary were Greek and Latin while the butterfly was on the wing, and the early flowers were brightening in the shady haunts they made their own.

Vain and vain were the efforts of the anxious minister of Rashult, and at last, utterly disappointed and hopeless, he proposed to make his son a shoemaker.

O poor young Karl, who loved sweet colour and form, and the flush of sunset through the lonely woods, and the pearldews on the new-blown flowers! But Karl was saved from such a destiny.

Dr. John Rothmann, who was his father's friend, persuaded the minister to entrust the boy's education to his care.

This love of flowers is too lovely to be wasted in a shoemaker's shop. This child has another destiny,' the kind physician had thought.

Life and loveliness now lay before Karl Von Linné. The delights of his idle childhood become the labour of the years!

He made himself famous among plants as none had ever done before. Dr. Rothmann

9.

guided his studies with a wise care, and Karl followed the guiding with the eagerness of love.

He had many learned friends. One of his first duties was assisting one of these with a work on the plants of the Bible. And soon his own works became too numerous to name.

The Swedish government sent him to Lapland to observe the green things there. When he returned home he wrote of them in his Flora Lapponica.

Book quickly followed book till the name of Linnaeus the naturalist was famous not alone in Sweden, but over all Europe. Linnaeus died on the tenth of January, at the age of seventy-one years. The classification of botany which he introduced took the name he bore. The Linnaen system was accepted by all who studied plant life.

The system of Linnaeus has since been displaced by that of De Jussieu, who died at Paris in the year 1853.

De Jussieu was of a French family which had numbered among its members botanists for a century and a half.

The list of famous botanists becomes longer than one can write, and you do not care perhaps to linger over it now.

So many beautiful and strange things are to learn about the flowers themselves-the flowers which are already your Own familiar friends.

Let us go together and gather them where we will. By the streams, in the meadows, on the hills. The beautiful flowers of God are bright with thoughts of Him.

They are His forget-me-nots' scattered all along our way. Their beauty twice beautiful when most joyfully we feel them