but the town clerk replied that a person of the name mentioned had died there about the time mentioned in my letter.  Here came the fatal gap in the evidence, which always seems to prevent the chain being perfect.  If I could have obtained a certificate of the death having occurred on the day of the snow-storm, I should have found myself nearer to a ghost than I ever expect to be again till I become one myself.  S.C.  CLARKE.

NOTES.

Treatises on the “language of flowers” should, to be complete, give a chapter on their political significance.  England had her War of the Roses; and of this contest a mild travesty may possibly be furnished in a French “Strife of the Flowers”.  The violet is the Bonapartist badge, and when, last spring, the emperor died in exile, and his partisans sought to show some outward token of their fidelity to his memory and his cause, violets began to bloom profusely in buttonholes as the half disguised emblem of the outlawed party.  But there was one unexpected result of this demonstration, for in republican Marseilles the flower-merchants found their trade in violets declining, owing to the popular distrust of this once favorite and unassuming flower.  It is almost incredible that the third city of France should have so thrown down the gauntlet to one of the sweetest gifts of Nature.  But if upon the innocent violet is to be heaped the curse of Sedan, then when Bourbonism lifts its abashed head are lilies to be proscribed in the Lyons market as violets were darkly suspected in Marseilles?  And if the radicals should make the red poppy their symbol, would it in turn be scorned by the lovers of the lily?  If so, with the numerous parties, new and old, in France, what flower could a Frenchman wear or cultivate without danger of being mobbed by the partisans of some other emblem in politics?

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Thousands of people who have passed the summer in the country, and have been accustomed to take long drives, will testify to noticing one great lack on the highways of our country.  This lack is that of guide-posts.  There is no more effectual way of giving a traveler a vivid impression of the sparsity of settlement in a rural district than to let him lose his way.  Regions which he might otherwise have fancied to be densely peopled will seem to him strangely depopulated.  In cities, where a hundred people can always be found between any two streets to tell you your whereabouts, we yet scrupulously post up signs at every corner; but in the country, where you may travel a mile before meeting a man or a house, hardly one in five of the junctions of thoroughfares are marked with guide-boards.  This lack is perhaps more serious in the suburbs of large cities than elsewhere, since in thinly-settled districts the main road at least is generally easy to keep.  Occasionally the post is a mocker, its painted letters being suffered to grow so dim with time as not to be decipherable; or perhaps the board has been carried off by a gale, or else turned the wrong way by some joker, who relies on the authorities to neglect the mischief.  It would save much time and temper for wayfarers were guide-boards multiplied fourfold in all parts of the country.