ful scenery, and derive a certain
amount of pleasure from nature, just glancing at each object, but really
observing nothing, and thus failing to learn any of the lessons this
world's beauty is intended to teach, they might almost as well have
stayed at home save for the benefit of fresh air and change of scene.
The habit of minute and careful observation is seldom taught in
childhood, and is not very likely to be gained in later life when the
mind is filled with other things. Yet if natural objects are presented
attractively to the young, how quickly they are interested! Question
after question is asked, and unconsciously a vast amount of information
may be conveyed to an intelligent child's mind by a simple, happy little
chat about some bird or insect. This is _admirably_ shown in a chapter
on Education in the Life of Mrs. Sewell. I would strongly urge every
mother to read and follow the advice there given.

We will now start for our garden walk. We have not taken many steps
before we are led to pause and inquire why there should be little
patches of grey-looking mud in the small angles of the brickwork of the
house. Opening one of the patches with a penknife we find a hollow cell,
and in it some green caterpillars just alive but not able to crawl. Now
I see that the cell is the work of one of the solitary mason wasps; she
brings the material, forms the cell, and when nearly finished lays her
egg at the bottom and provides these half-killed caterpillars as food
for the young grub when it is hatched, and by the time they are eaten
the grub becomes a pupa and then hatches into a young wasp to begin life
on its own account. One day I saw a bee go into a hole in the brickwork
of the house, and getting my net I waited to capture it; after about
five minutes the bee came out and flew into the net. It proved to be a
solitary mason bee, and was doubtless forming a place to lay its egg,
only, unlike the wasp, she would give the young grub pollen from the
stamens of flowers to feed upon instead of green caterpillars. I
remember seeing a mass of clay which had been formed into a wasp's nest
by one of the solitary species, under the flap of a pembroke table in an
unused room. A maid in dusting lifted up the flap, and down fell a
quantity of fine, dry mud with young grubs in it which would soon have
hatched into wasps, and revealed their rather strange nesting-place. I
have in my collection a very interesting hornet's nest, which w