In Aunt Judy’s Magazine for 1877 there is another Flower Legend, but of an English plant, the Lily of the Valley.  Julie called the tale by the old-fashioned name of the flower, “Ladders to Heaven.”  The scenery is pictured from spots near her Yorkshire home, where she was accustomed to seeing beautiful valleys blackened by smoke from iron-furnaces, and the woods beyond the church, where she liked to ramble, filled with desolate heaps of black shale, the refuse left round the mouths of disused coal and iron-stone pits.  I remember how glad we were when we found the woolly-leaved yellow Mullein growing on some of these dreary places, and helping to cover up their nakedness.  In later years my sister heard with much pleasure that a mining friend was doing what he could to repair the damages he had made on the beauty of the country, by planting over the worked-out mines such trees and plants as would thrive in the poor and useless shale, which was left as a covering to once rich and valuable spots.

[Illustration:  ST. MARY’S CHURCH, ECCLESFIELD.]

“Brothers of Pity” (Aunt Judy’s Magazine, 1877) shows a deep and minute insight into the feelings of a solitary child, which one fancies Julie must have acquired by the process of contrast with her own surroundings of seven brethren and sisters.  A similar power of perception was displayed in her verses on “An Only Child’s Tea-party.”

She remembered from experiences of our own childhood what a favourite game “funerals” is with those whose “whole vocation” is yet “endless imitation”; and she had watched the soldiers’ children in camp play at it so often that she knew it was not only the bright covering of the Union Jack which made death lovely in their eyes, “Blind Baby” enjoyed it for the sake of the music; and even civilians’ children, who see the service devoid of sweet sounds, and under its blackest and most revolting aspect, still are strangely fascinated thereby.  Julie had heard about one of these, a lonely motherless boy, whose chief joy was to harness Granny to his “hearse” and play at funeral processions round the drawing-room, where his dead mother had once toddled in her turn.

The boy in “Brothers of Pity” is the principal character, and the animals occupy minor positions.  Cock-Robin only appears as a corpse on the scene; and Julie did not touch much on bird pets in any of her tales, chiefly because she never kept one, having too much sympathy with their powers and cravings for flight to reconcile herself to putting them in cages.  The flight and recapture of Cocky in “Lob” were drawn from life, though the bird did not belong to her, but her descriptions of how he stood on the window-sill “scanning the summer sky with his fierce eyes, and flapping himself in the breeze,... bowed his yellow crest, spread his noble wings, and sailed out into the aether";... and his “dreams of liberty in the tree-tops,” all show the light in which she viewed the practice of keeping birds in