f their own,
and he began by actually finding a Hose-in-hose, which he named it
after "Christopher," and sent a bit of the root to Mrs. Ewing.

The last literary work that she did was again on the subject of
flowers. She began a series of "Letters from a Little Garden" in the
number of _Aunt Judy_ for November 1884, and these were continued
until February 1885. The Letter for March was left unfinished, though
it seemed, when boxes of flowers arrived day by day during Julie's
illness from distant friends, as if they must almost have intuitively
known the purport of the opening injunction in her unpublished
epistle, enjoining liberality in the practice of cutting flowers for
decorative purposes! Her room for three months was kept so
continuously bright by the presence of these creations of GOD
which she loved so well:--

"DEAR LITTLE FRIEND,

"A garden of hardy flowers is pre-eminently a garden for cut
flowers. You must carefully count this among its merits, because if
a constant and undimmed blaze outside were the one virtue of a
flower-garden, upholders of the bedding-out system would now and
then have the advantage of us. For my own part I am prepared to say
that I want my flowers quite as much for the house as the garden,
and so I suspect do most women." The gardener's point of view is
not quite the same.

"Speaking of women, and recalling Mr. Charles Warner's quaint idea
of all his 'Polly' was good for on the scene of his conflicts with
Nature, the 'striped bug' and the weed 'Pusley,'--namely, to sit on
an inverted flower-pot and 'consult' him whilst he was hoeing,--it
is interesting to notice that some generations ago the garden was
very emphatically included within woman's 'proper sphere,' which
was not, in those days, a wide one."

The Letters were the last things that my sister wrote; but some brief
papers which she contributed to _The Child's Pictorial Magazine_ were
not published until after her death. In the May number "Tiny's Tricks
and Toby's Tricks" came out, and in the numbers for June, July, and
August 1885, there were three "Hoots" from "The Owl in the Ivy Bush;
or the Children's Bird of Wisdom." They are in the form of quaint
letters of advice, and my sister adopted the _Spectator's_ method of
writing as an eye-witness in the first person, so far as was possible
in addressing a very youthful class of readers. She had a