* I know nothing so pretty as the manner in which creeping plants interwreath themselves one with another. We have at this moment a wall quite covered with honeysuckles, fuchsias, roses, clematis, passion flowers, myrtles, scobsea, acrima carpis, lotus spermus, and maurandia Barclayana, in which two long sprays of the last-mentioned climbers have jutted out from the wall, and entwined themselves together, like the handle of an antique basket. The rich profusion of leaves, those of the lotus spermus, comparatively rounded and dim, soft in texture and colour, with a darker patch in the middle, like the leaf of the old gum geranium; those of the maurandia, so bright, and shining, and sharply outlined--the stalks equally graceful in their varied green, and the roseate bells of the one contrasting and harmonising so finely with the rich violet flowers of the other, might really form a study for a painter. I never saw anything more graceful in quaint and cunning art than this bit of simple nature. But nature often takes a fancy to outvie her skilful and ambitious handmaiden, and is always certain to succeed in the competition. And such was really the case. The widow King had known better days. Her husband had been the head keeper, her only son head gardener, of the lord of the manor; but both were dead; and she, with an orphan grandchild, a thoughtful boy of eight or nine years old, now gained a scanty subsistence from the produce of their little dairy, their few poultry, their honey, (have I not said that a row of bee-hives held their station on the sunny side of the garden?). and the fruit and flowers which little Tom and the old donkey carried in their season to Belford every market-day. Besides these their accustomed sources of income, Mrs. King and Tom neglected no means of earning an honest penny. They stripped the downy spikes of the bulrushes to stuff cushions and pillows, and wove the rushes themselves into mats. Poor Tom was as handy as a girl; and in the long winter evenings he would plait the straw hats in which he went to Belford market, and knit the stockings, which, kept rather for show than for use, were just assumed to go to church on Sundays, and then laid aside for the week. So exact was their economy. The only extravagance in which Mrs. King indulged herself was keeping a pet spaniel, the descendant of a breed for which her husband had been famous, and which was so great a favourite, that it ranked next to Tom in her affections, and next to his grandmother in Tom's. The first time that I ever saw them, this pretty dog had brought her kind mistress into no small trouble.