JANUARY TENTH.-To-day I am filled with glee. A friend has lent me a very old book; in fact, only a bit of a book, but one part is perfect, and on the title-page I read : "A Queen's Delight: or, The Art of Preserving, Conserving, and Candying; as also a right knowledge of making Perfumes and Distilling the most Excellent Waters." Never before Published. Printed at the Angel in Cornhill. 1656.

What a lovely name—“ A Queen's Delight"! Could Ruskin have toy'd with this book when he wrote Of Queen's Gardens"? Was a woman a queen in her own home then as now? "They also are called to a true queenly power, not in their households merely, but over all within their sphere. . . . The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them. Her feet have touched the meadows, and left the daisies rosy.'" Yes, Ruskin understood. He would have us greater, nobler, grander than we are. If every little trivial task in the home was " A Queen's Delight," then life itself would be ennobled, and we should “idealise our Real."

I

open the book at random.

"TO MAKE SYRUP OF GLOVE GILLYFLOWERS.

"Take a quart of water, half a bushel of Flowers, cut off the whites, and with a Sive sift away the seeds, bruise them a little; let your water be boyled and a little cold again, then put in your Flowers and let them stand close covered twenty-four hours; to that liquor put in three pound of Sugar, let it lye in all night, then glasse it."

JANUARY ELEVENTH.—I have been making a collection of old Flower names. Names that Gerarde, and Parkinson, and all the old Herbalists refer to as "called by woman, or "given by old wives," or "called by the women of the country.' In fact the result of the genuine "mothertongue." I love the old names so. Here are a few

Blue Bells (wild Hyacinth) = Jacinth, Cuckoo-Boots.
Snowdrop The Virgin Floure, Pearl Drops, Sommer

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Fooles.

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Cowslip Paigle, Two-in-a-hose, Herbe Peter, Our
Lady's Keys, Petty Mullein, Palsy Wort.

Daisy Herbe Margaret, Eye of Day.

Daffodil Primrose Pearlesse, Lent Rose, Kings Chalice, Crow-bell.

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Lily of the Valley May Lilly, Convall Lily, Liriconfancie, Lilly Constancy, Our Lady's Tears.

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Poppy Joan Silver-pin, Cheese-bowles, The Red Mantle of Ceres, Corn Rose, Faire-without-andfoule-within, Head-aches.

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Corn-flower Blewe Bottle, Blew Blow, Hurt Sickle.
Milk Wort-Crosse-flower, Procession Floure.
French Lavender Cast-me-down, Stickadove.

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Marvel of Peru Four O'clock Flower, Princesses Leaf.
Pyracantha Thorne-ever-greene, Prickley Corall.
Peony Flower of Prosperity, Plant-of-Twenty-Days.
Star of Bethlehem = Eleven O'clock Lady.
Amaranthus Love-lies-Bleeding,

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Floure Gentle,

Floure Velure, Florimour, Velvet Flower.

Dock Patience.

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Another day I will give a longer list. My memory fails me for a moment, and my note-book is not at hand. I feel, suddenly, as if I had been transplanted three hundred years ago.

The Fieldfares are winter

After

JANUARY TWELFTH. visitors to us, and so do not breed in these islands. nesting in Norway and the northern parts of Europe, they move southwards to escape the rigours of a Scandinavian winter, cross the North Sea and arrive here in October and November. From the date at which they arrive it can be foretold whether the winter be an early or late one. For some weeks after the fieldfares come they live in a land of peace and plenty, and may be seen in company with large flocks of redwings, from whom they are easily distinguished by their larger size and blue backs. After a while winter lays its iron grasp on the soil, and the poor field fares have to travel many miles to obtain food. They then resort to holly trees, where with missel-thrushes and hawfinches they feast on the gorgeous berries kind Dame Nature so liberally provides. Alas! at such times they fall an easy prey to the boy-sportsman; for fieldfares are good eating. Though fairly plentiful all over the country, they are not generally seen in large flocks, preferring to move about in families, it would seem, when their unmusical "clack, clack, clack" may be nearly always heard as they fly overhead.

"I have discovered an anecdote with respect to the fieldfare which I think is particular enough. This bird, though it sits on trees in the day-time, and procures the greatest part of its food from whitethorn hedges; yea, moreover, builds in very high trees; yet always appears with us to roost on the ground. They are seen to come in flocks just before it is dark, and to settle and nestle among the heath in our forest. And, besides, the larkers, in dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them in the wheat-stubble; while the bat fowlers, who take many redwings in the hedges, never entangle any of this species. Why these birds, in the matter of roosting, should differ from all their congeners, and from themselves, also, with respect to their proceedings by day, is a fact for which I am in no way able to account."GILBERT WHITE, 1770.

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JANUARY THIRTEENTH.-Dear Veronica, this is your Saint's Day, but you, as you sit among your flowers, even in midwinter, with the sunshine round you, you do not one bit remind me of your namesake Saint Veronica who died in 1497. Her desire, forsooth, was to live ever on bread and water, and your longing is to live on love! Which do you think satisfieth most? I can hardly say. There are times on record when love leaves one sorely ahungered, and again times when one little crumb is enough to keep the flame of life burning with a fierce glow. Keep thy lilies white in the Queen's Garden. As I wrote in the

long ago :

"Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, come to all of us. We bear fruit, some thirty, some forty, and a very few a hundred-fold. We need a deal of pruning, and those who are pruned hardest bear the best blossoms. We cannot do without sunshine-and we cannot grow without showers."

"Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how ;
Everything is happy now,
Everything is upward striving;

'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,—
'Tis the natural way of living:

Who knows whither the clouds have fled?
In the unscarred heaven they have no wake;
And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,
The heart forgets its sorrow and ache."

-JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

JANUARY FOURTEENTH.-" By a garden is meant mystically a place of spiritual repose, still, peace, refreshment, delight," says Cardinal Newman. Modern authors agree with the old. "You have heard it said," writes Ruskin, "—and I believe there is more than fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a fanciful one-that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden of some one who loves them. I know you would like that to be true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers with brighter bloom by a kind look upon them; nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to guard; if you could bid the black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillars spare; if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind in the frost, 'Come, thou south wind, and breathe upon my garden.'"

I find in my MS. book the following quotation, but I do not know who wrote it: "Among the links between man's mind and Nature we may place, as one of the most obvious, man's earliest attempt to select and grasp from her scattered varieties of form that which-at once a poem and a picture-forms, as it were, the decorated borderland between man's home and Nature's measureless domains."

What a marvellous link a garden is between man and Nature. A plane on which we all meet, and every one is in sympathy. The love of a garden purifies a man's mind.