are laid bare beneath the scorching sunbeams, to the village green, the cheerfullest and pleasantest spot in a country parish. On one side an old farm-house, its stacks of chimneys shaped and twisted after the quaint fashion of other days, and only out-topped by the venerable elms before it; opposite a row of cottages overgrown with vines and honeysuckles. One of them is the dame's school; the green itself being the delightful playground to the merry urchins there. The other side of the green is bounded by the river and the old stone bridge that crosses it to the shaded lane leading to the village church in its churchyard. It was a bold and beautiful piety that led our forefathers to lay the senseless and corrupting body, the sad proof and witness of the sin and misery of our fallen race, round the spot where the prayers and praises of souls redeemed from eternal death are continually offered to the Father of the spirits of all flesh.

There is a description of a green field in the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney, which is so quaintly beautiful that I will quote it here :-" It was, indeed, a place of delight, for through the middest of it there ran a sweet brooke, which did both hold the eye open with her azure streams, and yet seek to close the eye with the purling noise it made upon the pebble stones it ranne over; the field itself being set in some places with roses, and in all the rest constantly preserving a flourishing greene; the roses added such a ruddie shew unto it, as though the field were bashfull at its own beautie."

I well remember a dark and tangled forest through which I delighted to roam, thrusting aside the branches that started back into my face as I passed, till I reached a wild glade surrounded and shut in by lofty trees and thickets; and there grew an old hawthorn tree, mantled in the snow of its fragrant blossoms. There I have startled from the hawthorn shade a doe and her timid fawn, which dashed away, in her bounding flight, the sparkling dewdrops that hung upon their low fern bower. I was a boy then, and I could almost believe that those wild deer and myself had alone discovered that solitary glade; and I have stolen round the whole enclosure with a vague fear, which it pleased me to encourage, lest the sound of my own footsteps should betray to human ears the secret of that green retreat; and I have even then crept into some hidden nook amid the long yellow broom and the luxuriant fern, and there peeped sideways through the long grass, to mark the little world of minute insects, to whom the tall and feathery blades appear an interminable forest, watching, with halfclosed eyes,

"The nameless tiny things

Climb the grass's spiral top,
Ere they toy their gauzy wings."

listening to the chirping of the grasshoppers, those ventriloquists of the field, with their continual and perplexing tinkling; or I have taken a great deal of trouble to assist some tiny captive with a blade of grass to escape from the entangling web of the grass spider.

It is on the Alps-the grand and glorious Alps

-that I have beheld the magnificence of grass. There, where the eye travels on from the flowerenamelled turf immediately at our feet to rich and sunny pastures all of the liveliest green, everywhere studded over with thousands and thousands of cattle, appearing but of pigmy growth from the stupendous heights; there, where luxuriant grass clothes the bold mountain-tops, and brightens beneath the very clouds of heaven, I remember creeping up the side of the Col de Ferret, after leaving the enchanting Val d'Aosta, on my way to the hospital of St. Bernard. We preferred this wild and unfrequented pass to the common route by Aosta. As I crawled, toiling along on hands and knees up the steep mountain side, I found the gentianella set like sparkling gem in the luxuriant dewy grass. When I reached the summit, I was walking on, when the guide called on me to stop. I did stop, and saw, as the clouds unfolded beneath that I was on the verge of a tremendous precipice. A dreadful abyss seemed to open all round me. The clouds parted away like folds of silvery gauze, and in the depths beneath shone out a lovely spot, where the sunbeams seemed sleeping on soft meadow scenery. Again a thick curtain of mist rolled before me; but a far-retreating desert of green mountains and savage rocks opened to my view, darkened by a visible shadow of soft rain, through which many a ray of transparent gold shot down from the mass of clouds above. Then through another vista I looked down upon a furious cataract leaping and boiling from caverns of white crusted ice, and plunging into the horrid darkness of a

fathomless ravine with the roar of thunder. I had imagined such scenes; I had hardly believed in their existence till then. The grandeur of those mountain regions baffles all description; the awfulness of such forms and hues, in some places boldly opposed to the dark clear blue of the sky, in others wreathed and confused by the ever-varying, evershifting vapours, and, below all, the deep green fairy valley.

There is another spot amid the Alps which I would try to describe. It is a small meadow of the greenest grass flourishing in the midst of snow and rocks high up in the most dreary mountain solitudes; and this soft verdure is strewed with the loveliest flowers. There blooms the gentian and the bright forget-me-not, many species of the cistus, the large purple heart's-ease, and many, many more, springing up close to the cold and barren snow. Spring seems to have run laughing to the desolation there, and, in playful defiance to the threats and eternal frowns of winter, flung down at his feet her fragile garland.

I never saw grass of such a vivid green as close to the beautiful cascade of Cluse, in Savoy, on a bank above the abyss into which the waters rush foaming down. The cloud-like spray falls in an unceasing shower

"Which round

With an unemptied cloud of gentle rain
Is an eternal April to the ground,

Making it all one emerald."

I wished to stand upon the bright turf; but found, when I reached the place, that it was impossible to do so without the risk of slipping into the deep

foaming gulf below, and of getting thoroughly wet, as I found that I was, in fact, standing in the waterfall, and the rainbow which played upon the cascade was actually shining around me.

The first day of summer in some far northern country must be enchanting. The sun blazing forth in unshorn splendour, and melting away the barren snow from the herbage beneath-grass already thick and luxuriant, and flowers which only waited for that sun to burst from their swelling buds. But England, what can equal the verdure of dear foggy England? where—

"Daisies pied, and violets blue,

And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo buds of yellow hue,

Do paint the meadows with delight."

Orange bowers and myrtle hedges must be very delightful; but then, when the trees are in their most gorgeous attire of fruit and flowers and rich foliage, when the air is one soft breath of perfume, and not a cloud stains the azure depths of heaven, then the grass is usually parched up, and the dew seems out of place upon the dull brown turf. I have heard of an English gentleman residing at Cintra who hardly kept a small patch of grass green by having it watered twice every day. How very different from the fresh grass beneath the darkfoliaged beech trees during an English summer, where the fairies keep their midnight revels, and leave the traces of their tiny presence in rings of deeper tinted verdure all the year long upon the greensward. C. B. Tayler.