were climbing on the stems and leaves.  They were pixies.  Each held in its arms an elfin baby tinier than itself.  She saw the babies laid in the bells of the plant, which were thus used as cradles, and the music was formed of many lullabies.  When the babies were asleep the pixies or fairies left them, and gamboled on the neighbouring sward on which the old lady discovered the day after, several new green rings,—­a certain evidence that her fancy had not deceived her!  At earliest dawn the fairies had returned to the tulips and taken away their little ones.  The good old woman never permitted her tulip bed to be disturbed.  She regarded it as holy ground.  But when she died, some Utilitarian gardener turned it into a parsley bed!  The parsley never flourished.  The ground was now cursed.  In gratitude to the memory of the benevolent dame who had watched and protected the floral nursery, every month, on the night before the full moon, the fairies scattered flowers on her grave, and raised a sweet musical dirge—­heard only by poetic ears—­or by maids and children who

    Hold each strange tale devoutly true.

For as the poet says: 

    What though no credit doubting wits may give,
    The fair and innocent shall still believe.

Men of genius are often as trustful as maids and children.  Collins, himself a lover of the wonderful, thus speaks of Tasso:—­

    Prevailing poet! whose undoubting mind
    Believed the magic wonders that he sung.

All nature indeed is full of mystery to the imaginative.

    And visions as poetic eyes avow
    Hang on each leaf and cling to every bough.

The Hindoos believe that the Peepul tree of which the foliage trembles like that of the aspen, has a spirit in every leaf.

“Did you ever see a fairy’s funeral, Madam?” said Blake, the artist.  “Never Sir.” “I have,” continued that eccentric genius, “One night I was walking alone in my garden.  There was great stillness amongst the branches and flowers and more than common sweetness in the air.  I heard a low and pleasant sound, and knew not whence it came:  at last I perceived the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures the size and color of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they buried with song, and then disappeared.”

THE PINK.

The PINK (dianthus) is a very elegant flower.  I have but a short story about it.  The young Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis the Fifteenth, was brought up in the midst of flatterers as fulsome as those rebuked by Canute.  The youthful prince was fond of cultivating pinks, and one of his courtiers, by substituting a floral changeling, persuaded him that one of those pinks planted by the royal hand had sprung up into bloom in a single night!  One night, being unable to sleep, he wished to rise, but was told that it was midnight; he replied “Well then, I desire it to be morning.”