ned my ankle last summer, and could not walk for many
weeks. Granny or brother Walter used to drive me in my chair
to the open window, to breathe the fresh air, and look at the
flowers in our little garden. There was nothing else to look
at there--nothing but roofs of houses and black chimneys; but
up the wall, and as high as my window, grew this very plant,
that looks so dead now, poor thing. Day after day I watched
its flowers, though I did not know their names, till I got to
see in them things that I thought nobody but me had ever
noticed."

"What things, Alice?"

"Across, a crown of thorns, nails, and a hammer."

"The Passion Flower!"

"So Mr. Henry told me one day when he found me reading my new
kind of book. It was like a book to me, that pretty flower; it
made me think of holy things as much as a sermon ever did."

"And Henry brought you then this book, because of the poem in
it on the Passion Flower?"

"He did, and read it to me out loud. It felt strange but
pleasant to have one's own thoughts spoken out in such words
as those."

"And you brought away your Passion Flower with you?"

"Yes, but it is dying now; and this gives me thoughts too,
which I wish somebody would write about. I should like to hear
them read out."

I took up her book, and drawing a pencil from my pocket, I
rapidly wrote down the following lines:--

"O wish her not to live again,
Thy dying passion flower,
For better is the calm of death
Than life's uneasy hour.

Weep not if through her withered stern
Is creeping dull decay;
Weep not, If ere the sun has set,
Thy nursling dies away.

The blast was keen, the winter snow
Was cold upon her breast;
And though the sun is shining now,
Still let thy flower rest.

Her tale is told; her slender strength
Has left her drooping form.
She cannot raise her bruised head
To face another storm.

Then gently lay her down to die,
Thy broken passion flower;
And let her close her troubled life
With one untroubled hour."

Alice read these lines as I wrote them. When I had finished,
she shook her head gently, and said,--

"These are pretty words, and pretty thoughts too; but not my
thoughts."

"Tell me your own thoughts, Alice; I would fain hear them."

"I can't," she said.

"Try."

"I think as I see the flowers die so quietly, that they should
teach us to die so too. I think, when I see my poor plant give
up her swee