Happy for the artistic temperament that can profit by such rebuffs!

PART III.

Yet, how few believe such doctrine springs
From a poor root,
Which all the winter sleeps here under foot,
And hath no wings
To raise it to the truth and light of things;
But is stil trod
By ev’ry wand’ring clod.

O Thou, Whose Spirit did at first inflame
And warm the dead,
And by a sacred incubation fed
With life this frame,
Which once had neither being, forme, nor name,
Grant I may so
Thy steps track here below,

That in these masques and shadows I may see
Thy sacred way;
And by those hid ascents climb to that day
Which breaks from Thee,
Who art in all things, though invisibly,
“The Hidden Flower.”

HENRY VAUGHAN.

One of the causes which helped to develop my sister’s interest in flowers was the sight of the fresh ones that she met with on going to live in New Brunswick after her marriage.  Every strange face was a subject for study, and she soon began to devote a note-book to sketches of these new friends, naming them scientifically from Professor Asa Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, whilst Major Ewing added as many of the Melicete names as he could glean from Peter, a member of the tribe, who had attached himself to the Ewings, and used constantly to come about their house.  Peter and his wife lived in a small colony of the Melicete Indians, which was established on the opposite side of the St. John River to that on which the Reka Dom stood.  Mrs. Peter was the most skilful embroiderer in beads amongst her people, and Peter himself the best canoe-builder.  He made a beautiful one for the Ewings, which they constantly used; and when they returned to England his regret at losing them was wonderfully mitigated by the present which Major Ewing gave him of an old gun; he declared no gentleman had ever thought of giving him such a thing before!

Julie introduced several of the North American flowers into her stories.  The Tabby-striped Arum, or Jack-in-the-Pulpit (as it is called in Mr. Whittier’s delightful collection of child-poems[30]), appears in “We and the World,” where Dennis, the rollicking Irish hero, unintentionally raises himself in the estimation of his sober-minded Scotch companion Alister, by betraying that he “can speak with other tongues,” from his ability to converse with a squaw in French on the subject of the bunch of Arums he had gathered, and was holding in his hand.

[Footnote 30:  Child Life. Edited by J.G.  Whittier.  Nesbitt and Co.]