THE SIX OF SPADES. 89 



find in his illustrated works the flowers brought in by 

 his brothers, and to communicate their name and 

 history. Their English names, mind you, for our 

 Curate wisely declines to muddle their small brains, 

 and weary their young jaws, with botany. I never 

 saw him angry but once, and then with a bilious old 

 gentleman, who proposed that all wild flowers 

 exhibited at our show should have their Latin names 

 and classification. " I'll tell you my mind," quoth 

 the Curate ; " botany is a grand science for those who 

 have the head and the time for it, but it's about as 

 useful to a ploughman's child as a ball-room fan to 

 an Arctic voyager ; and therefore, so far from reward- 

 ing any of my young rustics for Latinising our dear 

 old country flowers, I should be inclined to award for 

 the precocious pedant transportation to Botany Bay. 

 Carry out your idea and we shall have the labourer's 

 child no more exclaiming, ' Oh, faythur, there's a 

 dandelion ! ' but ' Aspice, paterfamilias dilecte, ubi 

 Leontodon taraxacum flavescit ! ' while his sister, 

 pointing to a buttercup, shall astonish its mammy by 

 requesting her to ' employ her optical apparatus in 

 the direction digitally indicated, and to admire the 

 Eanunculus bulbosus, of the class polyandria, and the 

 order polygynia.' " 



"I try to teach them something better about 

 buttercups," he said to me, as I met him one evening 

 with his boys, and he referred to the subject ; and 

 plucking one of the flowers in question, he held it 

 before a charming little fellow, who could scarcely 

 have seen half-a-dozen summers, and asked him if he 

 liad learned any verses about it. The answer came 



