And the grateful children often looked up as they passed beneath, and said—"Had it not been for our good Alarm-bell, we might all have perished!" So the Alarm-bell learned what it was made for; and was content to wait another hundred years, or more, before its voice was heard again. Thorns and Spines. * ————— IN a garden there once grew a beautiful, blossoming thorn. When the spring came, for a fortnight it was always clothed with a robe of white blossoms. They seemed at once relics of winter, and promises of summer. It was as if Winter, in departing from the earth, had left behind a fragment of his snowy vestments; and Spring, touching them with her magic wand, had transformed them from snow-wreaths into wreaths of snowy blossoms. They were beautiful even in fading; and for many days after the whiteness had gone, they glowed into a delicate pink, and strewed the earth with silky petals when they fell. * Thorns are abortive leaf-buds. Spines are the lower leaves of plants metamorphosed into bristles, to guard the young tree from the attacks of cattle. This little parable was suggested by a passage in "Modern Painters." On this thorn, one spring, a little brown leaf-bud formed, at the foot of a green twig, the cradle of the green twigs of the next spring. But it happened that, as this brown leaf-bud watched the beauty of the flowers, it grew discontented with its destiny:— "Why am not I a flower-bud?" it murmured, inside its little brown casing. "That would be worth living for!—To fill the air with delicate fragrance, to be sung to by the birds, to be gathered by human hands as a treasure; or even to live unnoticed by any one, but only to be a flower!—A beautiful, fragrant creature, with a coat of many colours, and a crown of golden stamens, and with promise in its heart;—that would be worth living for! But to be a leaf-bud, a brown, dark, hard leaf-bud!—It would be better to die at once." And a discontented shiver ran through its veins; and all that summer it never cared to drink in sun or rain, but sat and shivered, and shrivelled on its stem, while all around it, meek and happy buds were growing strong and full of life, nourished by the same rain and sunshine. And in the spring, when the white shower of snowy flowers came again on the thorn-tree, and the other leaf-buds had expanded into green twigs, waving and whispering in the breeze, with each a new bud at its feet, the envious and discontented bud had shrivelled and narrowed itself into a thorn, which pierced the hand of the child, as it reached up to gather the spray of fair white blossom. * * * *