"Yes; and I haven't forgotten it up to to-day. I was always collecting, and I had brought together every insect I had found in my neighborhood. As I took them home I pinned them in the drawers of an old-fashioned bureau. In time the whole of the drawers, bottom and sides, were full of pinned specimens, and there was room for no more. I had saved enough money to buy a cabinet, and I went to New York and purchased one. When I returned home the first thing I did was to look at my precious collection. When I opened a drawer there was a confused mass of wings only. One single wretch of a black ant had got in, and had passed the word to 10,000 other black ants. They had eaten the bodies of my insects in all the drawers. That quite broke my heart." "But your writing. How did that come about?" I asked. "I don't think that you can develop in one direction only. You must unbosom yourself. You are forced to tell or to write about the things you have most at heart. When I was a small boy I wrote a book for myself, and called it 'Botany on the Half-shell.' The first thing I ever wrote which was printed was an article for one of Messrs. Harper's publications, and I made the pictures for it. That was my début." "Then your work went hand in hand?" "Certainly. The one was the stimulant of the other. We all grew up together. The days spent in my room when I was ill helped me. I think I studied flowers then, so that their forms and colors were indelibly impressed on my mind. When I was older I made a small bunch of flowers in wax. Not a detail escaped me. I made moulds of all kinds of leaves. Once I put together a rose, some sprigs of mignonette and heliotrope in wax, and gave them to my dear old friend, Henry Ward Beecher. He was delighted with my flowers, and put them on his study table. Presently Mrs. Beecher came in. She ran to the flowers and broke the rose all to pieces." "How could she have done that?" I asked. "It must have been with her nose. She wanted to smell the rose." Then Mr. Hamilton Gibson showed me some monster drawings of flowers--Brobdingnagian ones. The flowers opened and closed when you pulled a string, showing their interior structure. Here were bees or other insects, and they flew into the flowers, collected the honey, and, above all, the pollen, and buzzed out again. He explained to me how plant life would perish if it were not for certain insects, which bring a new existence to flowers; for without these winged helpers there would be no longer any varieties of flowers or seeds. You will see, then, that in tracing the beginning of Mr. Hamilton Gibson's career what I mean by harking backward. I am certain, too, that in every boy and girl there is something good and excellent. Like the flower visited by the bee, all it wants is impulse. Then, as Mr. Hamilton Gibson explained it to me, will come the blossoming, and lastly perfect fruitage. BARNET PHILLIPS. The Story of The Floundering Beetle