20 PHENOMENA OF PLANT-LIFE. 



that aggravate the farmer un careful to nip them in the 

 beginning, supply in their seeds food for innumerable 

 little birds, especially those of the goldfinch kind. 

 Both plants, moreover, in vigor of growth, elegance 

 of organization, clear brightness of color, and long 

 continuing flow of cheerful bloom, take place with the 

 handsomest that the profusion of nature flings abroad. 

 We may travel many miles, and explore whole prov- 

 inces, and not find a more charming plant than the 

 crimson musk-thistle. In its native haunts and proper 

 abiding-places (which are by the edges of green lanes, 

 and on green and breezy downs overlooking the sea, 

 as on that fair green hill at Clevedon, from which we 

 look across the water to South Wales, and far away 

 westwards towards the Atlantic) it lifts a tall and 

 woolly stem, crowned with some half-dozen gorgeous 

 and half-drooping crimson heads, smelling of honey 

 and musk, and-more brilliant in effect than ten thou- 

 sand of the far-fetched, dear-bought, fashionable 

 exotics in gardens. 



All right-minded people thank God every day for 

 His greater gifts and bounties ; it is doubtful if any 

 of us remember to thank Him as steadily for the sim- 

 ple and common things of nature, which we seem to 

 ourselves to feel as our right, or at all events as so 

 much a part of the very idea of the world as to be- 

 come our lawful inheritance, and thus not needing to 

 be considered as objects of gratefulness. A thankful 



