LITTLE JOHNNY.


BY J.B. SYME.

* * * * *

It was our fortune to be born in the country--far away, at the foot of
one of the blue hills of Scotland--in a quaint old fashioned little
house--in a quiet little village that seemed shrunken and grey, and
grim, and decrepid with age. The drooping ashes, the solemn oaks, and
the shady plane-trees, spread their long arms tenderly over the
straw-thatched roofs of this lowly hamlet, as if to defend it from the
burning sun and reckless storms; and the Ayrshire rose and ivy crept up
and clung to its damp and crumbling walls. In the broken parts of the
gables, and in the crevices of the ruined chimneys, the dew-fed
wall-flower grew in poverty and beauty, and shook the incense from its
waving flowers into the bosom of summer. The bearded moss clustered like
a thousand little brown pin-cushions upon the old thatch, and older
stones; and sometimes the polyanthus and primrose, planted beside it by
some child who loved to look at flowers, would close their eyes and lay
their dewy checks upon the moss's breast at evening.

The only links that connected the simple, primitive people of this
little hamlet, with the purely ideal was their flowers. They did not
know about the participle mysteries that science has discovered in those
beautiful children of God, the flowers. They could not, like the poor
pariahs to whom the proud Hindoos of India will not speak, converse
poetic stories with those daughters of spring and summer; yet, they saw