wer Legend, but
of an English plant, the Lily of the Valley. Julie called the tale by
the old-fashioned name of the flower, "Ladders to Heaven." The scenery
is pictured from spots near her Yorkshire home, where she was
accustomed to seeing beautiful valleys blackened by smoke from
iron-furnaces, and the woods beyond the church, where she liked to
ramble, filled with desolate heaps of black shale, the refuse left
round the mouths of disused coal and iron-stone pits. I remember how
glad we were when we found the woolly-leaved yellow Mullein growing on
some of these dreary places, and helping to cover up their nakedness.
In later years my sister heard with much pleasure that a mining friend
was doing what he could to repair the damages he had made on the
beauty of the country, by planting over the worked-out mines such
trees and plants as would thrive in the poor and useless shale, which
was left as a covering to once rich and valuable spots.

[Illustration: ST. MARY'S CHURCH, ECCLESFIELD.]

"Brothers of Pity" (_Aunt Judy's Magazine_, 1877) shows a deep and
minute insight into the feelings of a solitary child, which one
fancies Julie must have acquired by the process of contrast with her
own surroundings of seven brethren and sisters. A similar power of
perception was displayed in her verses on "An Only Child's Tea-party."

She remembered from experiences of our own childhood what a favourite
game "funerals" is with those whose "whole vocation" is yet "endless
imitation"; and she had watched the soldiers' children in camp play at
it so often that she knew it was not only the bright covering of the
Union Jack which made death lovely in their eyes, "Blind Baby" enjoyed
it for the sake of the music; and even civilians' children, who see
the service devoid of sweet sounds, and under its blackest and most
revolting aspect, still are strangely fascinated thereby. Julie had
heard about one of these, a lonely motherless boy, whose chief joy was
to harness Granny to his "hearse" and play at funeral processions
round the drawing-room, where his dead mother had once toddled in her
turn.

The boy in "Brothers of Pity" is the principal character, and the
animals occupy minor positions. Cock-Robin only appears as a corpse on
the scene; and Julie did not touch much on bird pets in any of her
tales, chiefly because she never kept one, having too much sympathy
with their powers and cravings for flight to reconcile herself to
putting t