thering wild flowers is a pleasure too well known to need dwelling
upon, but studying plants botanically involves more than this, as the
student will soon find out. And there are difficulties, such as hard
Latin words of many syllables which must be pronounced, and, worse
still, _spelled_--a trying process even to the experienced. Care must
also be taken to write down everything distinctly, and there must be
patience, faithfulness, and resolute perseverance. But the reward comes,
and one feels paid for his trouble when he is able to pick a flower, to
sit down and _find it out_, and give to it its hard botanical name.

It is now spring, and the tears and smiles of April will quickly awaken
the sleeping wild flowers. Let me urge the young people to take up the
study of these "darlings of the forest." Gray's _First Lessons in
Botany_ will help along beginners, and before the flowers come we will
tell them where to find them.

Let each one have a ruled blank book of _good size_ to write down the
botanical and common name of every flower. How many flowers do you think
you can find in April? and who will find the most?

NOBLESSE OBLIGE.

BY V. G. SMITH.

Those of you who have studied French can translate this motto, and those
who have not may perhaps guess that it means "nobility obliges"; but it
is a favorite expression with so many different people, and it seems to
mean such different things to different persons, that perhaps it may be
worth while to tell a few anecdotes about what nobility has been
supposed to oblige us to do.

When James I. of England was a little boy in Scotland, he had an
extremely clever tutor, George Buchanan. Now Buchanan was a great Latin
scholar. He wrote verses, and was called the Scotch Virgil. Of course he
was very ambitious that his royal pupil should be a good Latin scholar
too, and the books say he "_whipped_ so much knowledge into him" that
James was called the "British Solomon." This was the approved way in
Great Britain at that time to educate boys. But there is a fact about
which most of the books are silent: Buchanan and his friends reasoned
that though it was quite true that James could never learn Latin unless
some one was whipped, it would be a dreadful thing to strike a boy of
the blood royal, and so they arranged that another boy should live at
court, who should be whipped every time James failed in his declensions
and conjugations.

This seems to have been a very sa