A CHILD'S WISH IN JUNE.

prith'ee, lan'guid-ly, rog'uish.ly, neigh'bour-ing, grass-hop'per.

1.

Mother, mother! the winds are at play;
Prithee, let me be idle to-day.

Look, dear mother! the flowers all lie
Languidly under the bright blue sky;
See how slowly the streamlet glides;
Look how the violet roguishly hides;
Even the butterfly rests on the rose,
And scarcely sips the sweets as he goes.

2.

Poor Tray is asleep in the noonday sun,
And the flies go about him one by one;
And pussy sits near with a sleepy grace,
Without ever thinking of washing her face.
There flies a bird to a neighbouring tree,

But very lazily flieth he;

And he sits and twitters a gentle note,
That scarcely ruffles his little throat,

3.

You bid me be busy; but, mother! hear
How the humdrum grasshopper soundeth near;
And the soft west wind is so light in its play,
It scarcely moves a leaf on the spray.
I wish, oh, I wish I was yonder cloud,
That sails about in its misty shroud;
Books and work I no more should see,

And I'd come and float, dear mother! o'er thee.

F

YOUNG BUFF-TAIL (1).

wriggle, fam'i-ly, Mid'dle.sex, re-la'tions, Italy, Germany, par'li-a-ment, po-lice'men, e-las'tic, en've lopes, hospital, plen'ti-ful, gen'tle-men, cat'er-pil·lar.

Bah! Ts! Go! Take care, little foot, what you are treading on! Move one step back, if you please, off from the gravel on to the grass, and let me glide and wriggle just where I fancy.

Ho! ho! You are laughing, are you? You thought I said giggle, and you must go and giggle directly! I did not say giggle; I said wriggle. And I meant it; and so I tell you. Hm! The idea of laughing at me! Do you know who I am? Of course you don't, though. If you did, you would not be so foolish.

I am a very grand person-a very grand person, indeed. There are some of my family in Middlesex, and some in Wiltshire, and some in all the other fifty counties of Wales and England, and, I daresay, some in Ireland and Scotland, and I am sure there are a great many of us in France. No doubt, too, as I am so very grand, you would find plenty of my cousins, and uncles, and nephews, and all other relations, in Italy, and Germany, and Turkey, and, indeed, all over the world; but I will tell you how I am sure that there are plenty like me over there in France.

The parliament of Paris made an edict, or law, about me once. They did, indeed. I thought I should make you stare. And it is ever so many years ago; about a hundred and fifty; and that is so very many years ago, that, at that time, your great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, who were alive then, had no policemen, and no

pillar-posts, and no gas-lamps, and no elastic sides to their boots, and no envelopes, and no violet ink, and no children's hospital.

There! See what poor things your people were, whilst mine were so grand and plentiful, they were obliged to be talked of in an edict, or law. Ah! There is nothing like being one of a real old family! Nothing-nothing. It makes you feel so grand, and look so grand, and talk so grand, and really be so graud, which is ever so much better and more grand than all.

Yes; it is true. An edict, or law. No wonder. I shall be nearly three inches long when I have grown as big as I can grow, and I am covered with such gay stripes of black and yellow. And no wonder. I am such a beautiful buff at my tail! Of course you will like to hear why the polite French gentlemen took so much trouble about us. We were eating up every leaf on every oak-tree that they had. Ha! ha! ha! There we were, great and small, old caterpillars and young caterpillars; whether the oaks budded out fresh green leaves, or whether they had grown more dark and dry, whether it was bright hot sun-time for us to feed in, or whether we had to nibble by the pale light of the silver moon, there we were, and we kept eating, eating, till the French peasants, and their dark-eyed wives, with clean white caps on, did not know what to do. We nibbled and nibbled, and we swarmed and swarmed, till their oak-trees stood brown and bare, and there was nothing left on them but bark and branches.

YOUNG BUFF-TAIL (2).

reg'i.ment, sol'diers, ha'zel, de-li'cious, mar'quis, orch'ard, ti'ni est, po-lite', people, fright'ened, obliged', feath'er-y.

Ha ha ha! I must laugh at it again, because I think it is so very droll and grand ! And we have such a funny way of eating leaves too. I don't suppose you know, as you are so very young and foolish, but leaves are made of two skins, I will call them, grown tight together, with the veins, or food-pipes, running in between. We know this, though you don't. We know it directly we are hatched out of our egg-shells, when we are only just a little scratch long; and we eat only one skin of the leaf, so that we may have the other to crawl on; and there we eat till we have eaten from where the stalk is, down to the very tip.

You should just watch us when we are doing this. We get a great many of us together, and we march in lines, exactly like a regiment of tiny soldiers. Of course we kill the leaves, although we only nibble away one side. The other half very soon parches and withers, and there is the tree, as I said, bitten bare, with nothing on it but brown bark and branches. Well, this is just what my people did to the oak-trees in France-the oak-trees that were standing over there, letting shadows down on the heads of the polite Frenchmen.

But do you suppose that when all the oak-leaves were eaten, they left off eating? Ah! that shews how very foolish you are. My people are not so silly as to sulk, and to find fault when one sort of food they like is all gone, and there is no more of it. They eat something else then, and are very thankful to get it. Sometimes it is beech-leaves, sometimes it is lime-leaves, sometimes it is

hazel-leaves, sometimes it is filbert-leaves (tp, tp, tp! so delicious!), sometimes it is elm-leaves, sometimes it is willow. And what did my people do over in France, but, when the oaks were all gone, get to swarming and nibbling and clustering over all the fruit-trees.

Then it was that the French counts and barons and marquises grew frightened at us, and began to shrug their shoulders, and to talk to each other in French very loudly, and to look very angry and very strong, and to meet in parliament about us, and to make their edict, or law. They said the poor people must go into the forests, and the orchards, and the gardens, and along the roads, and in the lanes, and must pick the caterpillars off the trees, and kill them, else they would punish them, and be very severe indeed.

The poor people were obliged to do what the parlia ment said. They did go into the forests and orchards, and all the other places; but-ha! ha! ha!-try their very best and hardest, stretch out their longest, and stoop down their lowest, get up on ladders, or on three-legged stools, shake the trees even, give them great cross blows, they could not take us all away, they could not pick off every one of us, and leave the fresh young leaves to grow again, bright-green and glossy, and with both their skins whole. A tree is rather large, you know, when you think of its tip-top branches and its branches brushing upon the ground, and its arms going right to the right, and its other arms going right out to the left, besides those going out to the back and the front, and all up the middle; and we caterpillars can climb, climb, all over it, much farther than men and boys can, and we are just as safe on the tiniest twig as on the oldest and strongest trunk. So, of course, the