Mount slowly, sun! and may our journey lie
     Awhile within the shadow of this hill,
     This friendly hill, a shelter from thy beams!

“That reminds me,” said Coristine, “of a fellow we had in the office once, whose name was Hill.  He was a black-faced, solemn-looking genius, and the look of him would sink the spirits of a skylark down to zero.  ‘What’s come over you?’ said Woodruff to me one fine afternoon, when I was feeling a bit bilious.  ‘Oh,’ said I, ’I’ve been within the shadow of this Hill,’ and he laughed till he was black in the face.”

“Corry, if I were not ashamed of making a pun, or, as we say in academic circles, being guilty of antanaclasis, I would say that you are in-corri-gible.”

Coristine laughed, and then remarked seriously, “Here am I, with a strap-press full of printing paper in my knapsack, and paying no attention to science at all.  We must begin to take life in airnest now, Wilks, my boy, and keep our eyes skinned for specimens.  Sorry I am I didn’t call and pay my respects to my botanical friend at the Barrie High School.  He could have given us a pointer or two about the flowers that grow round here.”

“Flowers are scarce in July,” said the schoolmaster, “they seem to take a rest in the hot weather.  The spring is their best time.  Of course you know that song about the flowers in spring?”

“Never heard it in my life; sing it to us, Farquhar, like a darlin’.”

Now, the dominie was not given to singing, but thus adjured, and the road being clear, he sang in a very fair voice:—­

We are the flowers,
The fair young flowers
That come with the voice of Spring,
Tra la la, la la la, la la,
Tra la, tra la a a a.

Coristine revelled in the chorus, which, at the “a a a,” went up to the extreme higher compass of the human voice and beyond it.  He made his friend repeat the performance, called him a daisy, and tra la la’d to his heart’s content.  Then he sat down on a grassy bank by the wayside and laughed loud and long.  “Oh, it’s a nice pair of fair young flowers we are, coming with the voice of spring; but we’re not hayseeds, anyway.”  When the lawyer turned himself round to rise, Wilkinson asked seriously, “Did you hurt yourself then, Corry?”

“Never a bit, except that I’m weak with the laughing; and for why?”

“Because there is some red on your trousers, and I thought it might be blood—­that you had sat down on some sharp thing.”

“It’ll be strawberry blite, I’ll wager, Blitum capitatum, and a fine thing it is.  Mrs. Marsh, that keeps our boarding house, has a garden where it grows wild in among the peas.  She wanted some colouring for the icing of a cake, and hadn’t a bit of cochineal or anything of the kind in the house.  She was telling me her trouble, for it was a holiday and the shops were shut, and she’s always that friendly with me; when, says I, ‘There is no trouble about that.’