whilst this mode of being deposited by a poor little donkey made us all laugh!  Truly, ’there is but a step between the sublime and the ridiculous;’ and my adventure certainly smacked of the latter.  But Fanny had conquered; and, as if with one stroke to confirm her victory, and to rejoice over it, she suddenly turned over on her back, cracked the girths of the old saddle, and rolled over and over in the dust with all four legs up in the air.  This was too much for endurance; so, leaving George to readjust the saddle as best he might, and bring home our basket of spoils, I turned back, and sauntered homewards with my bunch of ‘timely-flouring bulbous violets’ in my hand.  At Kersbrook I discovered a new treasure—­one which, however, I afterwards found to be common, although it was then unknown to me—­and it was some time before I could make out what it was.  I took it for a saxifrage, but could find nothing under that head which exactly answered to it.  It was, I at last discovered, the golden saxifrage (Chrysosplenium oppositifolium) or opposite-leaved sengreen, nearly allied to the saxifrages, and of the natural order saxifrage, but not one of them.  I found it fringing the side of the brook between the wall and the water.  It grows about four or five inches high, with branched stems bearing very succulent, kidney-shaped leaves opposite each other—­the radicle leaves on long foot-stalks, whilst those of the stem-leaves are much shorter.  The flowers, which are of a bright greenish-yellow, grow in small umbels; and the whole plant has a yellowish hue.  The uppermost flower in general bears ten stamens, whilst the next boasts of but eight each.  Its capsules are two-beaked, one-celled, and two-valved, the seeds numerous and roundish.  It is named from chrysos, ‘gold,’ and splen, ‘the spleen.’  There is another specimen much like this, of which I have spoken, Chrysosplenium alternitifolium; but it is larger, handsomer, and less common.  In the Vosges this plant is much used—­as our own water-cress is in England—­for a salad, under the name of Cresson de Roche.  There is a little flower, elegant and singular in appearance, though, as its name indicates, not one of much splendour, which resembles the golden saxifrage, in the peculiarity of having a different number of stamens in its crowning floret from those of the lower ones:  this is the green moschatel (Adoxa moschatellina), adoxa signifying ‘inglorious.’  The flowers are pale-green, in a terminal head of five florets, the upper of which is four-cleft, and has eight stamens, the other being five-cleft, with ten stamens in each.  Its fragile stem and delicate compound leaves, and the early season at which it blossoms, give attraction to this little plant, and make it a favourite with me.  The butter-cups are not yet in bloom; but the daisies!  Oh, what store of daisies is on every bank and in every field, and what troops of baby children, with their little baskets, sitting on the green turf and picking them!  I do love the daisy; and indeed I much fear that I should have been found taking part with that ‘merry troop’ of ’ladies decked with daisies on the plain,’ of which we read in Dryden’s elegant fable of The Flower and the Leaf, rather than with those wiser and more renowned who ’chose the leaf’:—­