EDDIE'S LANTERNS.
BY ALBERT H. HARDY.
Eddie loves to watch the fire-flies
As the summer evenings pass,
Flashing like a shower of diamonds
In and out the meadow-grass.
"What are all the lights?" I ask him.
"Gracious! papa, don't you know?
God has sent these little lanterns,
So the plants can see to grow."
EASY BOTANY.
JULY.
June, with its rounded freshness unsullied by a faded leaf, its wood paths gay with flowers, its glorious sunsets and sunrises, its perfection of beauty and sweetness—June has passed along to make room for the fervid July. This midsummer month has its charms, and can show a fair array of bright blossoms, the yellows becoming more prevalent, and all the colors deepening as the heat grows more intense. The delicate spring flowers are succeeded by a stouter and somewhat coarser display. The species of veratrum, or false hellebore, which is now to be seen in New England swamps and pastures, is a very striking plant; it has long leaves, strongly veined and most beautifully plaited, with numerous racemes of green flowers, forming a large terminal pyramid. The Indiana veratrum, found in deep woods at the West and South, is a tall plant, five or six feet high, with very large leaves, and has a kind of unholy look, the flowers almost black, with red stamens.
This is the month for hosts of wild peas and vetches: the purple vetch in New England thickets; the everlasting-pea on Vermont hill-sides; the pink beach-pea and marsh-pea on New Jersey coasts and Western lake shores: the pale purple myrtle-pea climbing over banks by New England road-sides; the blue butterfly-pea, two inches broad, very showy, and found in woods and fields of New York and Pennsylvania. These are all graceful and pretty.
On Western prairies blossoms the deep pink prairie rose, the only native climbing rose of the States, and on rocky banks in Pennsylvania woods may be found the beautiful wild hydrangea flowers, silvery white or rose-color. Let the young flower-seeker not fail to look for the interesting parnassia, or grass of Parnassus, so named by the learned Dioscodorus more than eighteen hundred years ago, who found it growing on Mount Parnassus. One species of this little plant is abundant in damp fields in Eastern Connecticut and in the Middle and Southern States. The leaves are round and firm, the flower star-shaped, white, and streaked with fine green lines.