Robins in the tree-top,
Blossoms in the grass,
Green things a-growing
Everywhere you pass;
Sudden little breezes,
Showers of silver dew,
Black bough and bent twig
Budding out anew.
Pine-tree and willow-tree,
Fringed elm and larch—
Don't you think that May-time's
Pleasanter than March?
South Norwalk, Connecticut.
I want to tell you how to make a little winter garden next fall. Fill a small box with earth, and in it plant ferns and mosses, put a small looking-glass in it for a lake, get your brother to make a glass frame to fit over the top, and you will have a lovely garden when the ground is covered with snow.
These warm sunny days make me think the wild flowers will soon be here. First the violets, blue and white, sweet-scented—the fields back of the school-house will be covered with them; then adder's-tongue, dandelions, anemones, and many others, with the bees humming among them. You ought to see what nice salads we make of the leaves of adder's-tongue and dandelions. How often I wish that I could send flowers to the sick children in the hospitals, if the express would only carry them free on the railroad!
Dear Young People, I have a brook near my school-house; it widens and narrows, and makes a great noise. By-and-by it will be full of tadpoles, or young frogs, and the apple-trees near it loaded with blossoms. I am glad I live in the country. It is all very well for you city people to have nice parks and picture-galleries; but I have the nicest pictures, a different one each way I look.
Jessie B.
Lowell, Massachusetts.
I am a boy eight years old. When I was up at Greenville, N. H., I was out in the meadow, and they were cutting the grass, and I had lots of rides on the team. The man that was mowing told me that there were some moles under a tree on a large rock, and I went and looked under every tree in the field, and I asked him again, and he went with me, and they were all around in the grass, and the man had to pick them out of the grass, and they were no bigger than my thumb. I put them in a little pail, and I filled the pail with soft thistle blows, and I kept the moles three days, and then I put them under a stone wall, and the next day my father and I took a walk, and I asked him to come and see if they were under it, and so we went down, and the bed that I fixed for them was all torn to pieces, and I suppose the mother did it.
Ralph P.