Round about the house masses of another yellow flower are planted with no sparing hand--the great St. John's wort. It is pleasant to look upon, but it has another value. Dare I tell it in the nineteenth century, this age of railroads and telegraphs and iron-clads, when space and time are in a fair way to be annihilated, and nothing is so sacred that it may not be questioned, no problem so hard that men may not try to solve it? In the days when Bramshill House was built our forefathers believed firmly in a whole unseen or rarely-seen world around them of fairies, ghosts, spirits and witches. In some out-of-the-way corners in England--even in these days of board schools and competitive examinations, when we are told that King Arthur never existed and that William Tell is a "sun-myth"--some remnants of this belief still linger. In Devonshire folks speak shyly and with bated breath of the "good people;" and even in the year of grace 1879 a Warwickshire laborer was had up before the magistrates for having with a pitchfork half killed a poor old woman whom he declared to be a witch. But be that as it may, in the reign of James I. no one doubted the existence of the spirit-world about us, and on St. John's Eve all its denizens, good and bad, were supposed to wander freely where they would. One only thing they feared, and that was the great St. John's wort. Therefore, all who wished to guard house and home from the unwelcome visitors, who pinched the maids, turned the milk sour and plagued their victims with a thousand impish tricks, planted it freely about their gardens; and thus it is that you see its golden flowers amid their shining rich green leaves and crimson shoots round nearly all old English homes. Do not laugh at these old fables, gentle reader. When we wander over the green turf and through the wide halls we seem to have opened a door that leads us back into the past out of the turmoil of the nineteenth century. And surely for a moment it can do us no harm to leave our striving, hurrying, anxious modern life, and picture to ourselves the days when our forefathers maybe were ignorant and superstitious, but when they knew how to build and how to fight and how to write--the days when England became "a nest of singing birds." ROSE G. KINGSLEY. FOOTNOTES: [1] In hunting dialect the warning "'ware" or "beware" is shortened to "war'," as in the old advice, "War' horse, war' hound, war' heel!" CANOEING ON THE HIGH MISSISSIPPI. TWO PAPERS.--I. [Illustration]