n her garden with the Florae gathering
flowers and the Graces making garlands of them. The British borrowed the
idea of this festival from the Romans. Some of our Kings and Queens used
'_to go a Maying_,' and to have feasts of wine and venison in the open
meadows or under the good green-wood. Prior says:

Let one great day
To celebrate sports and floral play
Be set aside.

But few people, in England, in these times, distinguish May-day from the
initial day of any other month of the twelve. I am old enough to
remember _Jack-in-the-Green_. Nor have I forgotten the cheerful
clatter--the brush-and-shovel music--of our little British
negroes--"innocent blacknesses," as Lamb calls them--the
chimney-sweepers,--a class now almost _swept away_ themselves by
_machinery_. One May-morning in the streets of London these
tinsel-decorated merry-makers with their sooty cheeks and black lips
lined with red, and staring eyes whose white seemed whiter still by
contrast with the darkness of their cases, and their ivory teeth kept
sound and brilliant with the professional powder, besieged George Selwyn
and his arm-in-arm companion, Lord Pembroke, for May-day boxes. Selwyn
making them a low bow, said, very solemnly "I have often heard of _the
sovereignty of the people_, and I suppose you are some of the young
princes in court mourning."

My Native readers in Bengal can form no conception of the delight with
which the British people at home still hail the spring of the year, or
the deep interest which they take in all "the Seasons and their change";
though they have dropped some of the oldest and most romantic of the
ceremonies once connected with them. If there were an annual fall of the
leaf in the groves of India, instead of an eternal summer, the natives
would discover how much the charms of the vegetable world are enhanced
by these vicissitudes, and how even winter itself can be made
delightful. My brother exiles will remember as long as life is in them,
how exquisite, in dear old England, is the enjoyment of a brisk morning
walk in the clear frosty air, and how cheering and cosy is the social
evening fire! Though a cold day in Calcutta is not exactly like a cold
day in London, it sometimes revives the remembrance of it. An Indian
winter, if winter it may be called, is indeed far less agreeable than a
winter in England, but it is not wholly without its pleasures. It is, at
all events, a grateful change--a welcome relief