veals its presence, as the happiness diffused around shows where the good, the dutiful, abide. There is another flower-queen, whose reign commences in Junethe meadow-queen, meadow-sweet, not so grand or beautiful as the white water lily, but whose perfume, resembling that of the heliotrope, cheers the passenger by her rich breath. The rushes and grasses are now in flower; one of the prettiest and easiest to examine is the bearded rye grass (lolium multiflorum), with its yellow or purple anthers, like tassels, trembling on their slender filaments.

In our country, during June, the sun shines for sixteen hours in a day; warming the earth, and hastening the growth of corn and fruit. Birds awake before his rising, early as it is, and welcome him with their loudest songs; but they rest for about an hour in the middle of the day, when one seldom hears a chirp or a flitting wing in wood or lane. Mankind, also, were not meant by their kind Father to labour for a long day of sixteen hours. God has appointed for us all work for heart and head, as well as hands. Work and rest, work and rest, is his beneficent and wise law, with intervals for innocent amusement; yet let us not mistake idleness for rest-nothing is more unlike. Rest is delightful after every kind of labour; idleness-dreary, weary, listless idleness-is more fatiguing than labour; and it brings, too, a conscious feeling of being a cumberer of God's earth, of wasted powers and talents, that sours the temper; while the active are cheerful, for they find or make employment, and thus have no time to waste in fretfulness. God, who made us for activity, ordains that cheerfulness shall depend on the proper use of our faculties of mind and body, and the exercise of every better feeling of the heart.

Busy little friends, there is always something for us all to do; something to learn-somebody to help. The boy or girl who feels this, will become the wise, useful man or woman, whose intrusted talent is employed to the best purpose. Busy little friends, peep, like the bee, into every flower; read there the marks of our Father's hand, and admiration of their wondrous beauty will fill all the honey-cells of your loving hearts

with reverence for his power and goodness, and sweet thoughts will be treasured up to cheer the trials of your future lives.

A BEECH GROVE IN EARLY JUNE.

Yes, this is God's cathedral; these smooth stems,
Springing in light and airy elegance,

Like slender shafted pillars, bear aloft

A waving canopy of emerald green,

And high above them hangs the clear blue dome

Of heaven, flecked here and there with snowy cloudlets;
While the grand sun of June, in midday state,
Beams like the enthroned regent of the sky.

How clearly marked the outline of each leaf,
How delicate its fresh transparency,

That hardly shades the dazzling azure vault.
Hark! as the south wind whispers, to its notes
How leaf and bough keep time with dancing motion,
While thousand choristers chant hymns of joy,
The joy and love that fill their little hearts;
While, from the topmost branches, a low hum
Of murmuring insects swells glad nature's hymn;
And quiet creatures, gifted with no voice,
Stir with a rustling sound the mossy floor,
As they, too, joyed in the long summer day
Of bright and glorious June.

J. A.

A WALK IN EARLY SUMMER.

Lizzy: I want you to look at these seaweeds, father, which we collected last year when we spent our holidays in the Isle of Man. Will you tell us something about them?

Father: Ah! they are very beautiful, certainly; some are a deep red, some are olive coloured, and some are green. Some are like long beautiful ribbons, and others again are more like feathers. You remember in our walk some time since, we collected some plants, the fungus, the conferva, the lichen, which I told you were made entirely of cells. The sea-weeds are a division of vegetable creations belonging to the same great class of Cell Buildings (or cellulares), that is, I mean they are made of cells alone.

Charley But what can be the use of all these seaweeds down in the water, where no one can see them? Father: Not see them! Why do you not see them down there with the mind's eye? And seeing them there with the mind's eye, ornamenting the great world of waters, does not the world seem all the more beautiful to you?

Lizzy: Oh, how nice that is-to think that God has such regard for us that he fills the hidden depths with beauty, that they may seem the more beautiful to our imagination.

Charley: Then, at that rate, father, sea-weed is only created to be rooted up and thrown on the shore, that students, like Lizzy, may pick it up.

Father: Well, strange as it may seem, I believe there is much truth in that. I believe the beauty has been stamped on the various forms of sea-weeds as well as other things for the sake of the mind of man. But sea-weeds themselves have been created to serve other purposes, while they serve the purpose of enriching the human mind.

James: Yes, I remember in the Isle of Man, the women used to collect some of the sea-ribbons which they called Dulse-in baskets, and carry them into the town to sell for eating.

Father: And I have no doubt sea-weeds, like the vegetation on land, serve for the purpose of feeding, and sheltering various kinds of living creatures-fishes, snaillike creatures, creatures like crabs, lobsters, and creatures too small for the naked, human eye to see. One little branch of sea-weed will often have so many living things as to form quite a study for the naturalist. Well, we have only noticed plants that are cell-buildings hitherto. Take now the conferva or mermaid's hairthe lichen and the sea-weed especially; and see if it strikes you that there is anything in which cell-buildings are deficient.

James: They seem deficient in the power of sup porting themselves, and so of rearing themselves into the air.

Father: Precisely so: in the cell-buildings the Creator evidently intends chiefly to create ornaments of this

world which shall be beautiful ribbons floating up and down in the water, yielding to the motion of every wave, or else creations like rosettes-the lichens-to ornament the rocks, and trunks, and branches of trees.

Charley: Then, in order to make plants which shall stand upright, I suppose it is necessary to put strengtheners or stays in them.

Father Exactly. You see, then, that this is the next thought that the mind seems naturally to add to the thought of cell-buildings, and then we get the double thought-cell-buildings with strengtheners, or as these are called vessels, and hence they are called cell and vessel buildings, or for shortness, vessel buildings (vasculares.)

James: But what sort of things are vessels ?

Father: They, too, are simply long cells or tubes, with pointed ends, very much like Lizzy's wooden netting-needles. These are placed together, and thus form a support to raise the form of the plants high and gracefully in the air.

Charley I suppose these strengtheners or vessels then make the wood, for I have been biting this stick for the last half hour, and I find I can tear it into fibres.

Lizzy: And are not those beautiful veins and framework of leaves, which we have often picked up in the winter, and lately seen beautifully white under glass shades, in a shop-window in Manchester, strengtheners or vessels ?

Father: Yes, and the fibre of flax with which are made the boys' collars that you have been stitching, are also woody fibres or vessels.

Charley: Oh, Jamey! we are like horses, and wear wooden collars round our necks.

Lizzy: And is cotton made of strengtheners too?

Father: Cotton is made of long pipe-like cells, but cells not used for strengtheners, but having the office of surrounding the seeds of the cotton plant, to keep them warm. But let us go back. We have now a new thought, cell-buildings with strengtheners. If we followed the plan we laid down at the beginning for producing variety in the world, we should vary, then, this new

thought as much as possible, just as we did the old one. Now, let us imagine how we could vary cellbuildings with strengtheners. Let us walk through the plantation by the reservoir, and try if anything you see will suggest anything to your mind.

Lizzy: Well, here are a number of young ferns unrolling themselves, peeping from rocks and the decayed roots and stumps of the old trees. Oh, I see! I see! I remember when I first wanted to draw a tree I drew it stiff, like a fern; I made all the branches go off opposite one another at the same angle, and that is one way in which the strengtheners could be placed.

Father: This is the way in which they are placed in the ferns, the mosses, and the horse-tail, producing the FEATHERY FORMS (acrogens) either in a broad fanlike shape, or like a plume of feathers.