ply the buttercup again.
Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers are
worshipped with the old worship; and we start back, and rub our eyes,
and wonder whether life is all a delusion, and whether this pure
creature of home and bread-and-butter is the volatile, provoking little
puss who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday.

But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential
character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a
pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and
repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get
out of the regular operations of the sap and the mine. We sympathize
with the ingenious gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the
ground of his dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its
daily rising and setting. There is something delightfully cometary about
the affection of the buttercup. Any experienced strategist in the art of
getting married will tell us the exact time within which her elder
sister may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign. But the
buttercup lies outside of the rules of war. She gives one the pleasure
of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the
pleasure of _rouge et noir_. One feels in the presence of a buttercup
the possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other sphere
compatible with each other--the delight, say, of a musing over 'In
Memoriam' with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And meanwhile the
buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, into a
world mysterious and unknown to her. Tones of deeper colour flush the
pure white light of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of womanhood.
And with the death of the dawn the buttercup passes insensibly away. The
next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays that give her to
us, and dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit with the
laugh of the buttercup.

ABBOT AND TOWN.

The genius of a great writer of our own days has made Abbot Sampson of
St. Edmunds the most familiar of mediaeval names to the bulk of
Englishmen. By a rare accident the figure of the silent, industrious
Norfolk monk who at the close of Henry the Second's reign suddenly found
himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not the greatest, of English abbeys
starts out distinct from the dim canvas of the annals of his house.
Annals in