2 TO Country Rambles. 



plainly declared in the trim little garden adjoining his 

 cottage. The number of plants we once counted in 

 it, all curious, exceeded three hundred. Evans died 

 June 23rd, 1874, and was followed to his grave in 

 Worsley churchyard by more than a thousand people, 

 including a hundred and seventy young children. For of 

 the little folk, especially girls, he was always immensely 

 fond; they went to the churchyard more of their own 

 accord than because led. His sympathy with them was 

 the sweetest of all sympathies the sympathy of tender- 

 ness and simplicity; no wonder that many of them 

 carried little chaplets of midsummer field-flowers. We 

 often hear of magnificent funerals chariots and plumes ; 

 they may not, after all, be such as we should so well 

 care to be the pattern of our own. The cottage itself 

 wherein he resided was clean and bright as a sea-shell 

 just washed by the waves. If the love of the clear 

 purity of wild-flowers kept alive in old Evans the love 

 of one thing more than another, it would seem to have 

 been that of a home absolutely spotless, still maintained, 

 we believe, by one who always reminds us of a rose in 

 the snow. In figure Joseph Evans was tall and thin, a 

 lofty forehead conferring a dignity upon his appearance 

 which invariably attracted strangers. Never was this 

 more observable than at a natural history meeting once 

 at the Manchester Athenaeum.*" 



* For further particulars respecting old Joseph Evans, see the 

 Gardeners' Chronicle for November I4th, 1874, from which we have 

 transcribed, being our own words, a small portion of the above, 



