* * * * * I have often thought how capitally I invested five shillings a few years ago, in two apple-trees, which I gave to two poor women living under the hill. One of the trees produced twelve fine apples the second year; the year following, its owner sold a couple of bushels of the fruit. In a cottage full of hungry children, where meat is only tasted on Sundays, a good apple-pudding is no despicable hot dish on the noon-day board. Blackberries, of the children’s gathering, sometimes make a savoury addition to it. When my cook Hannah married and settled in a cottage of her own, I gave her a few roots of Myatt’s Victoria rhubarb, and some round, white, American early potatoes, with enough onion-seed for a nice little square bed; a quart of peas, a quart of beans, a few early horn carrots, and a little parsley-seed; also pennyworths of canariensis, nasturtium, escolzia Californica, sweet-pea, candytuft, and red and white malope. Her husband immediately dug, raked, and planted the ground, and at once took to gardening after his day’s work. I need not say they are a respectable couple. He cannot read; but she reads _The Leisure Hour_ and _Sunday at Home_ to him. Though we had a February of almost unprecedented warmth, I am told the primrose is shyly and charily putting forth its blossoms. But soon the warm banks will be gay with them, while the sweet wood-violet will betray itself by its fragrant breath at the roots of old trees. Among the earliest wayside productions is Jack-in-the-hedge, or sauce-alone; as ugly a Jack as one need wish to see, breathing odiously of garlic. Somewhat later, and rarer, is the perfoliate shepherd’s-purse, with its miniature pouches, that remind one of the scrip wherein a young shepherd, who lived to be a king, put five smooth pebbles from the brook. Its leaves, as I lately showed the little Prouts, are perfoliate, that is to say, they look as though the stem runs _through_ them—a very nice and singular distinction, never to be forgotten after being once seen. A fortnight hence I expect to hear the yellow celandine has made its appearance. Wordsworth, who has immortalized it, as much as a poet can immortalize a flower, says, at first his unaccustomed eye saw it nowhere; afterwards, he saw it everywhere. If the month be genial, we shall, towards its close, see “God’s hand-writing on the wall” of our gardens, in the opening buds and blossoms of our cherry-trees. Sheep are already turned out on the fresh pasture-land: their bleatings and tinkling bells sound prettily. Here and there may be seen a bee, a small fly, a gnat: how soon shall we see the first butterfly?