A root of this plant was sent to the Hermit by a heavenly messenger, which the boy planted, and anxiously watched the growth of, cheering his master with the hope—"Patience, my Father, thou shalt see yet!"
Meantime greater light was breaking in upon the Hermit's soul than had been there before:
"My son, I repent me that I have not been patient under affliction. Moreover, I have set thee an ill example, in that I have murmured at that which God—Who knoweth best—ordained for me."
And, when the boy ofttimes repeated, "Thou shalt yet see," the Hermit answered, "If God will. When God will. As God will."
And at last, when the white bud opens, and the blood-like stains are visible within, he who once was blind sees, but his vision is opened on eternal Day.
In Aunt Judy's Magazine for 1877 there is another Flower Legend, but of an English plant, the Lily of the Valley. Julie called the tale by the old-fashioned name of the flower, "Ladders to Heaven." The scenery is pictured from spots near her Yorkshire home, where she was accustomed to seeing beautiful valleys blackened by smoke from iron-furnaces, and the woods beyond the church, where she liked to ramble, filled with desolate heaps of black shale, the refuse left round the mouths of disused coal and iron-stone pits. I remember how glad we were when we found the woolly-leaved yellow Mullein growing on some of these dreary places, and helping to cover up their nakedness. In later years my sister heard with much pleasure that a mining friend was doing what he could to repair the damages he had made on the beauty of the country, by planting over the worked-out mines such trees and plants as would thrive in the poor and useless shale, which was left as a covering to once rich and valuable spots.
ST. MARY'S CHURCH, ECCLESFIELD.
"Brothers of Pity" (Aunt Judy's Magazine, 1877) shows a deep and minute insight into the feelings of a solitary child, which one fancies Julie must have acquired by the process of contrast with her own surroundings of seven brethren and sisters. A similar power of perception was displayed in her verses on "An Only Child's Tea-party."
She remembered from experiences of our own childhood what a favourite game "funerals" is with those whose "whole vocation" is yet "endless imitation"; and she had watched the soldiers' children in camp play at it so often that she knew it was not only the bright covering of the Union Jack which made death lovely in their eyes, "Blind Baby" enjoyed it for the sake of the music; and even civilians' children, who see the service devoid of sweet sounds, and under its blackest and most revolting aspect, still are strangely fascinated thereby. Julie had heard about one of these, a lonely motherless boy, whose chief joy was to harness Granny to his "hearse" and play at funeral processions round the drawing-room, where his dead mother had once toddled in her turn.