LOS eye OT] 
trombone might'be accounted’ podgy for military purposes—conclude 
with ‘‘ God save the Queen,” we feel every one of us that we have met 
“for good, that there are refreshments in life which can cheer and 
strengthen for many a toilsome day, and that the surest purest happi- 
ness is that of men working with the means which are at hand, so 
ample and so apt when charity seeks them, to make those around them 
happy. I remember to have heard from an elderly colonel of my 
acquaintance, that, when a young man, he was in the habit of going 
frequently for tea and picquet with an invalid aunt, because he thought 
it his duty. It was an aweful bore at first, he said, but he afterwards 
found in his kinswoman a most genial companion and excelient friend. 
“I learned more wisdom from that gentle sufferer,” he told me, with 
an earnest. thankfulness, ‘than could be extracted from a platform- 
load of Spurgeons; and, though I give you my honour that I always 
thought, until the day of her death, that she was in straitened circum- 
“stances, she left me ten thousand pounds.” ‘‘Oh!” exclaims the 
‘Sceptic, with his unbelieving sneer; and I only wish the colonel could 
hear him. He would repeat his small observation in a very different 
key. 
‘ But where ’s the Curate? We left him communing with Cooper pére 
—he is now with Cooper fils. And there can be no question whatever 
‘that Tom junior is at this moment the happiest individual out. He 
has won the first prize for a posy of wild flowers (we call it a bouquet 
in our schedule, but I like the sweet old English word far better, and 
so do the little florists), achieving this victory over thirteen competitors, 
and surmounting obstacles of a stupendous magnitude; for it is currently 
reported, not only that Billy Jenkinson’s mother had been seen, on her 
return from weeding, with large contributions of field flowers for her 
sweet William, but further that Tim Norris’s big brother ‘‘ got all his, 
and tied’em up for him.” Against these fearful odds, these grand 
advantages, Tom Cooper has won the day; he has utterly discomfited 
the mother of Jenkinson, and annihilated the large fraternity of Norris. 
There he stands, reading the card, which proclaims his conquest, for 
the ninety-third time, and merrier than Mr. Merry himself, when 
‘Thormanby shot forward opposite the stand, and all that he wished 
was won. 
‘Whence came, I wonder, Tom’s taste for wild flowers, and his clever- 
ness in grouping them so prettily? Ask him, and he will look up with 
a smile at the Curate, who is even now suggesting to him how he 
might have made some little improvements; and if you would know 
furthermore how and when the lesson is learned, ask the Curate, as I 
have asked, and you will hear his system. 
On Sunday evenings, in the summer time, some twenty boys from 
the village school assemble, when the weather is fine, at his Reverence’s 
garden gate. They have been good lads in church and school, or they 
would not be there; and as our ecclesiastical Spade comes out, with 
some books on wild flowers in his hand, little blue-eyed Joe Birley 
plucks him by the coat, and whispers proudly into an ear, very 
promptly inclined to receive the information, ‘* If you please, Sir, I 
said all that big cholic” (collect for the day intended) ‘‘to Miss Rose, 
