d's Tea-party," and "Papa Poodle."

"The Adventures of an Elf" is a poem to some clever silhouette
pictures of Fedor Flinzer's, which she freely adapted from the German.
"The Snarling Princess" is a fairy tale also adapted from the German;
but neither of these contributions was so well worth the trouble of
translation as a fine dialogue from the French of Jean Mace called
"War and the Dead," which Julie gave to the number of _Aunt Judy_ for
October 1866.[29] "The Princes of Vegetation" (April 1876) is an
article on Palm-trees, to which family Linnaeus had given this noble
title.

[Footnote 29: These translations are included in "Miscellanea," vol.
xvii.]

The last contribution, in 1876, which remains to be mentioned is
"Dandelion Clocks," a short tale; but it will need rather a long
introduction, as it opens out into a fresh trait of my sister's
character, namely, her love for flowers.

It need scarcely be said that she wrote as accurately about them as
about everything else; and, in addition to this, she enveloped them in
such an atmosphere of sentiment as served to give life and
individuality to their inanimate forms. The habit of weaving stories
round them began in girlhood, when she was devoted to reading Mr. J.G.
Wood's graceful translation of Alphonse Karr's _Voyage autour de mon
Jardin_. The book was given to her in 1856 by her father, and it
exercised a strong influence upon her mind. What else made the
ungraceful Buddlaea lovely in her eyes? I confess that when she pointed
out the shrub to me, for the first time, in Mr. Ellacombe's garden, it
looked so like the "Plum-pudding tree" in the "Willow pattern," and
fell so far short of my expectation of the plant over which the two
florists had squabbled, that I almost wished that I had not seen it!
Still I did not share their discomfiture so fully as to think "it no
longer good for anything but firewood!"

Karr's fifty-eighth "Letter" nearly sufficed to enclose a declaration
of love in every bunch of "yellow roses" which Julie tied together;
and to plant an "Incognito" for discovery in every bed of tulips she
looked at; whilst her favourite Letter XL., on the result produced by
inhaling the odour of bean flowers, embodies the spirit of the ideal
existence which she passed, as she walked through the fields of our
work-a-day world:

The beans were in full blossom. But a truce to this cold-hearted
pleasantry. No, it is not a folly to be under the empi