The quiet park where deer haunt the glades must have looked gay indeed when the grandson of Elizabeth’s Sir Amyas entertained Mary of Scotland’s grandson, Charles I., at Hinton in 1644, with a loyalty that was ready to face much and pay heavily for his allegiance to the King. It was only fifty-five years from the day of Queen Mary’s execution when the two grandsons met at Hinton. Five short years were to pass, and the head of Charles I. fell from the block with a fortitude not unlike that of his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots. A few years more, and Hinton is holding high festival again, and feasting the Duke of Monmouth with junketing in the park. Almost directly after, the Duke was fleeing from Sedgemoor to be captured in the Hampshire fields, and travel to London and the headsman’s axe on Tower Hill. As we walk back past the closed windows and fancy the treasures inside of portraits and statues, and frames by Grinling Gibbons, we find a poor dead thrush, called a “home-screech” in these parts, because its note is not so tuneful as that of its brother thrushes. The bird and its empty nest expresses the want we feel about this lovely spot with its sad memories. The nest is too good and fair to be left untenanted. CLOTILDA MARSON. [Illustration] [Illustration] LESSONS FROM NATURE. BY JEAN A. OWEN, Author of “Forest, Field and Fell,” etc. PART V. ADAPTABILITY TO CIRCUMSTANCES. Many persons look upon plants as still life, forgetting, or ignorant of, the fact that their existence depends on the movement of the juices which are embodied in them. This is not even quiet in winter, when all about the plant would seem dead indeed. There is still motion being carried on, although it is necessarily of a very feeble or languid nature. There is perhaps only a very slight enlargement of the buds, but there it is nevertheless; the almost imperceptible development preparing for spring’s coming. If a small part of the cuticle of the _Vallisneria_, an aquatic plant, is placed under the microscope, there is visible in every one of its tiny cells a number of little globules coursing in order, round and round, faster or slower, in a varying degree of motion, until the portion under observation has exhausted its vitality. And by a wonderful instinct—as we say—the flowers of this species, male and female, which grow on different plants, are able to detach themselves at the right season. That is, the male flowers can leave the plant stems, and floating about on the stream, they join the female flowers, and so the reproduction is effected in them by a spontaneous action on their part which is brought about in many other cases by an outside agency, the action of bees, for instance.