1895.] ESSAYS. 75 



Perhaps behind the little school-house, where, in the seeming endless 

 summer days, we droned over the mysteries of the beginnings of 

 learning, while through the open door the sunlight streamed in and 

 the birds' songs came, and the multitudinous hum of insects, there 

 was an oak-grove. There in June days we used to find the purple 

 lady's slipper. This stands out distinct, vivid as lightning in a 

 summer night. There may have been others, but they have left no 

 impression. Yet the sight now of the purple lady's slipper sends the 

 memory back through the flight of years and fills the stage again with 

 its busy actors, and gives a special interest to this flower wherever 

 seen. 



The sights and sounds of early youth have a glamour about them 

 which nothing in later years can destroy. 



It is for this reason that emigrants love to carry with them to their 

 new homes on the other side of the world some of the plants and 

 animals associated with the old home. Froude tells us that in 

 New Zealand the sweet-brier was long ago imported by the English 

 missionaries, who liked to surround themselves with the pleasant 

 home associations. 



There is no prettier picture in Charles Reade's " It is Never too 

 Late to Mend," than that of the thirty or forty rough fellows, mostly 

 gold-diggers, who have gathered on a Sunday morning at a squatter's 

 house to listen to a caged sky-lark. 



"The song swelled his little throat and gushed from him with 

 thrilling force and plenty, and every time he checked his song to think 

 of its theme, the green meadows, the quiet, stealing streams, the 

 clover he first soared from, and the spring he sang so well, a loud sigh 

 from many a rough bosom, many a wild and wicked heart, told how 

 tight the listeners had held their breath to hear him ; and when he 

 swelled with song again, and poured with all his soul the green mead- 

 ows, the quiet brooks, the honey clover, and the English spring, the 

 rugged mouths opened and so stayed, and the shaggy lips trembled, 

 and more than one drop trickled from fierce unbridled hearts down 

 bronzed and rugged cheeks. 



" And these shaggy men, full of oaths and strife and cupidity, had 

 once been light-headed boys and strolled about the fields with little 

 sisters, and little brothers, and seen the lark rise, and heard him sing 

 this very song. — And so for a moment or two, years of vice rolled 

 away like a dark cloud from the memory, and the past shone out in 

 the song-shine ; they came back, bright as the immortal notes that 

 lighted them, those faded pictures and those fleeted days; the clover 

 field, the cottage, the old mother's tears when he left her without one 

 grain of sorrow, the village church and its simple chimes ; and the 

 clover field again hard by in which he lay and gambolled, while the 



