Harriett used to catch and kill flies for pleasure, and would have so treated any living insect she saw; but she now holds bees in great respect, and also, I hope, some other insect workers, for one day she was much pleased to find one of the small spotted spiders, which had during the night spun its web across the fire-grate. She asked me many questions about it, (I permit her to do so on principle, at certain times, as a part of her education); she said it was “a shame” to break “such beautiful work,” and left it as long as she could; and then, (entirely of her own accord) she carefully slipped her dusting brush under web and spider, and so put the “pretty little dear” outside the window, with the gentle remark, “There, now you can make another.” Was not this hopeful? This child had lived all her life in one of the low, crowded courts in the centre of the town, and her ignorance of all green life was inconceivable. For instance, to give her a country walk I sent her last March with a parcel to a village near the town, and when she came back—having walked a mile through field-paths—she said she did not think there were “such a many trees and birds in the world.” And on that memorable day she first saw the lambs in the field—within two miles of the house where she was born. Yet she has the purest love for flowers, and goes into very real ecstasies over the commonest weeds and grasses, and is nursing with great pride and affection some roots of daisy, buttercup, and clover which she has brought from the fields, and planted in the little yard at the back of our house; and every new leaf they put forth is wonderful and lovely to her, though of course her ideas of “gardening” are as yet most elementary, and will be for some time, apparently. But it is really helpful to me to see her happiness over it, and also when my friends send me a handful of cut flowers—we have no garden; and the eagerness with which she learns even their names, for it makes me feel more hopeful about the future of our working classes than some of your correspondents.