Reaching my hand into the hedgerow to pick a long, lithe, blossoming spray of black byrony--here it is, with its graceful climbing stem, its glossy, heart-shaped leaves and its pretty greenish lily flowers--I have stung myself rather badly against the nettles that grow rank and tall from the rich mud in the ditch below. Nothing soothes a nettle sting like philosophy and dock-leaf; so I shall rub a little of the leaf on my hand and then sit awhile on the Hole Farm gate here to philosophize about nettles and things generally, as is my humble wont. There is a great deal more in nettles, I believe, than most people are apt to imagine; indeed, the nettle-philosophy at present current with the larger part of the world seems to me lamentably one-sided. As a rule, the sting is the only point in the whole organization of the family over which we ever waste a single thought. This is our ordinary human narrowness; in each plant or animal we interest ourselves about that one part alone which has special reference to our own relations with it, for good or for evil. In a strawberry, we think only of the fruit; in a hawthorn, or the flowers; in a deadly nightshade, of the poisonous berry; and in a nettle, of the sting. Now, I frankly admit at the present moment that the nettle sting has an obtrusive and unnecessarily pungent way of forcing itself upon the human attention; but it does not sum up the whole life-history of the plant in its own one peculiarity for all that. The nettle exists for its own sake, we may be sure, and not merely for the sake of occasionally inflicting a passing smart upon the meddlesome human fingers.