74 
NATURE NOTES. 
PAGES FROM A DAY BOOK.'- 
|NYONE who loves flowers and herbs, old gardens, and 
old garden lore, will be delighted with Mrs. Fuller 
Maitland’s book. Although it is in London that her 
heroine, a half-invalided lady, writes, yet her thoughts 
are, for the most part, of the country ; in imagination she follows 
the autumn planting of bulbs and roots, the spring blossoming 
of the flowers one after the other ; sympathizes with their joy in 
the sun or rain, and in her old herbals studies their quaint 
names and “ vertues.” The garden learning, the recipes for 
spices or medicines, legendar}- among English ladies, and handed 
down from one generation to another in old houses in the country 
— all these old-fashioned traditions of healing and beauty Bethia 
Hardacre studies and treasures. Even for the older lore of 
magic— of white magic, at least — she has a certain tenderness, 
sympathizing with the simple innocent old witches and astro- 
logers, and finding amid all their childish and unreal science a 
very real and very human desire to cheat fate and sorrow. 
So she copies out for us the old charms and draughts, the 
pomanders for the cure of melancholy and “ comforting of the 
hearte.” 
“ Is Vervain, Monkshood, Helleljore 
Of use in sorcery no more ? 
Can Lunary and Mistletoe 
No longer serve for weal or woe 
she writes in one of her charming little poems. 
Gradually, as one reads these sketches, one comes to form, 
touch by touch, a clear picture of the room in which they are 
written — a room with bright flowers and chintzes, “ few friends 
and many books.” Now and then the door opens on the out- 
side world ; the silly Clara St. Quentin comes in, or the vulgar 
Mrs. Goddall. But soon they are gone ; their victim with pity 
■or delicate amusement notes down their foolish talk and turns 
to her quiet and books again. 
Not that Bethia Hardacre scorns life, or cares little about 
it — it is only that she cares too much, one realizes, as one 
becomes aware of the book’s deeper human interest ; she cares 
too much, and, like the old magicians, would discover if she 
could some way of propitiating fate. But her study of the old 
charms, she finds, is as vain as the charms themselves for the 
cure of grief ; it is in no occult, but in a very human form, that 
happiness comes to her at last when “ the luck changes.” 
Mrs. Fuller Maitland writes with a carefulness and distinc- 
tion of language that is rare and delightful now-a-days. To her, 
words are neither mere algebraic symbols, nor brick-bats to be 
* from the I')ay-Book' of Bethia Ilanlaerc, by Kll.i Puller Maitland. 
( Ch.Tinnan Hall, 5.S.) 
