study beneath \-oiir notice ? More .showy plants may 

 appeal to us. The brilliant hue of our favourites 

 of garden and field please our sense of colour, but 

 they cannot teach us more of structural beauty than 

 the grasses. To the student, perhaps, the latter are 

 especially useful, as a study of form more easily 

 understood than when he is led away by the glory of 

 colour in a bunch of flowers. 



When you notice the loveliness of some of the 

 feathery varieties — the fragile delicacy of their flower 

 stems, barely thicker than a human hair, their 

 beautiful though subdued colouring, grey-green and 

 purple as they advance towards maturity — I think 

 you will agree with me that they are worth careful 

 consideration as studies, even at a time when Nature 

 is at her gayest and brightest. 



I do not mean that you are to make a study of 

 meadow grasses to the exclusion of other flowers, but 

 find them a little place in your programme at least, 

 and when you are desirous of composing a group of 

 the beauties of the field, a few sprays of grass, introduced with 

 discretion, will act as a charming accompaniment to the brighter hues 

 of the flowers, and look right ; because, having grown up side by side 

 in Nature's scheme, they are in harmony one with another. 



Ox-eye daisies, ragged Robin, meadow-sweet, meadow crane's-bill, 

 poppies, cornflowers, and many others, are the glory and delight of 

 the summer fields, and although perhaps, with limited time at our 

 disposal, it is impossible to make studies of them all, before their brief 

 span of life is over for another year, we can make a charming and 

 varied selection from them, while the hedgerows afford us the beautiful 

 traveller's joy, wild rose, honej'suckle, wild convolvulus, or morning 

 glory, with others too numerous to mention. 



Although these little chats are primarily addressed to amateur 

 artists, they will doubtless be read also by those who have the care and 

 upbringing of young children as their life-work. Therefore I want 

 to have a word with them, especially. 



I have often thought, when I have seen a joung nursery governess 

 plodding wearily along the high road with her charges, as if the daily 

 constitutional were a pain and penance to all concerned, how much 

 more interesting and instructive to both pupil and teacher alike such a 

 daily walk might become if the latter would teach the little ones to take 

 more than a passing interest in the beauties of hedgerow and field. 

 All young children love flowers naturally, but this love unfortunately 

 often develops into mere acquisitiveness and reckless tearing up of 

 roots, unless they are taught that this is harmful and wrong. Let the 



And myriads of the tircat-eycd butterflies 

 Hovered above the white and yellow bloon^s. 

 And fluttered through the lirasses silver-flowered. 

 Filled with the noise of grasshoppers and flics. 



48 



