TEE PARABLE OF JOASH. 77 



pie always pretty ; and dress them always in the height of the 

 fashion. One may read Miss Edge worth's ' Harry and Lucy,' 

 'Frank and Mary,' ' Fashionable Tales,' or 'Parents' Assist- 

 tant,' through, from end to end, with extremest care ; and 

 never find out whether Lucy was tall or short, nor whether 

 Mary was dark or fair, nor how Miss Annaly was dressed, nor, 

 which was my own chief point of interest what was the 

 colour of Rosamond's eyes. Whereas Aunt Judy, in charm- 

 ing position after position, is shown to have expressed all her 

 pure evangelical principles with the prettiest of lips ; and to 

 have had her gown, though puritanically plain, made by one 

 of the best modistes in London. 



3. Nevertheless, the book is wholesome and useful ; and the 

 nicest story in it, as far as I recollect, is an inquiry into the 

 subject which is our present business, ' What is a weed ? ' in 

 which, by many pleasant devices, Aunt Judy leads her little 

 brothers and sisters to discern that a weed is ' a plant in the 

 wrong place.' 



' Vegetable ' in the wrong place, by the way, I think Aunt 

 Judy says, being a precisely scientific little aunt. But I can't 

 keep it out of my own less scientific head that ' vegetable ' 

 means only something going to be boiled. I like * plant ' bet- 

 ter for general sense, besides that it's shorter. 



Whatever we call them, Aunt Judy is perfectly right about 

 them as far as she has gone ; but, as happens often even to the 

 best of evangelical instructresses, she has stopped just short 

 of the gist of the whole matter. It is entirely true that a weed 

 is a plant that has got into a wrong place ; but it never seems 

 to have occurred to Aunt Judy that some plants never do ! 



Who ever saw a wood anemone or a heath blossom in the 

 wrong place ? Who ever saw nettle or hemlock in a right 

 one ? And yet, the difference between flower and weed, (I 

 use, for convenience sake, these words in their familiar oppo- 

 sition,) certainly does not consist merely in the flowers being 

 innocent, and the weed stinging and venomous. We do not 

 call the nightshade a weed in our hedges, nor the scarlet agaric 

 in our woods. But we do the corncockle in our fields. 



4. Had the thoughtful little tutoress gone but one thought 



