the opposing ranks became a confused cloud and so vanished.

Are our readers at all sceptical? If so, let them take warning from what befel an unbeliever: "Upon the 2nd of May, 1662, an honest and credible person, living near the Falcon, on the Bankside in Southwark, having occasion to be on the water about Ereife, late at night, did discourse with the waterman about the Book of Prodigies, saying he never could see anything of that nature which that book did make mention of, neither could he believe there was any truth in those stories. While he was thus discoursing there appeared suddenly a very great fire upon the water, which gave a very clear light; and immediately they saw two ships coming very near them, and were sorely afraid that they should have been boarded by them, and thereof the waterman did bestir himself to get out of the way, but his boat was fast. He thought at first he was aground; but finding it was not so, he attempted again to row, but could not make his boat stir. The ships now being very near them, one of them was turned into the likeness of a very tall man, about twenty feet high. Upon this, the person in the boat, being extremely affrighted, fell to praying, and immediately the appearance stood still, and was turned in on one side. They being very near it, and looking upon it about half an hour, precisely discerned the form of its countenance. At length they plainly saw fire come out of its belly, and then it moved towards the Bankside, and there consumed away as if it had been a barrel of pitch." Meanwhile the other ship had taken the shape of a castle, and it was not until both had disappeared that the waterman was able to move his boat, and convey his converted fare to his destination.

The circulators of these Munchausenisms certainly intended their readers to believe in them; whether they believed in them themselves we more than doubt. They wished to inspire their more ignorant fellows with the belief that the day of their triumph was at hand, and that these prodigies were so many signs of the good time speedily coming. Probably they thought such pious frauds no frauds at all, and had no hesitation, when their own invention failed, in having such things manufactured to order; just as dealers in articles of the sort now obtain any number of anecdotes of angelic infants and stupendously pious youngsters. It is strange,

perhaps, that such stories should emanate from folks who condemned dramatic and literary fictions as ungodly, and who were never weary of reproaching their adversaries with encouraging vain superstitions. Still we may hardly halloo. When a popular religious paper tells of a poor charwoman praying to be kept from the world, and soon afterwards losing her hand by an accident, thereby being made incapable of her usual work, and compelled to retire into an obscure garret, and live on the voluntary contributions of the charitable, and heads the story, Prayer Answered, it is plain we ourselves are not yet quite out of the wood, and therefore not entitled to laugh at similar freaks on the part of our ancestors.

GARDENING AT LILLE.

In early summer, the rhythm of the railway train from Calais to Lille beats pleasant music, though somewhat monotonous a pastorale in A flat, imbued throughout with quiet sweetness, to be marked "dolce" if arranged for the piano. To my mind, it nearly marked the measure of Haydn's "With verdure clad the fields appear, Delightful to the ravish'd sight," which I involuntarily kept humming to myself, as when one is haunted by the ghost of a tune. But it really is a well-sustained movement, allegro moderato, with everrecurring themes (almost amounting to a refrain) of emerald pastures, lowing herds, slow-creeping streams, tufted pollards, tall elms, sometimes clustered into clumps, sometimes ranged in rectilinear rows, hedgeless fields of corn coming into ear, and market-gardens outspread before the towns and villages. Such is the burden of the song-the hymn of labour which man addresses to a bountiful Providence. The occasional fioriture interspersed along its current, are patches of lilac-flowered poppies (grown to make salad-oil from their seed), sweet-scented areas of blossomed beans, and white lilies floating in every pool and river. The further you advance, the more cheerfully you find the earth to be singing with gladness. On quitting the main line of rail in order to take that which leads into the city, the locomotive makes a long ad libitum cadenza, the train meanwhile counting a pause. The gap in the fortifications by which it enters Lille is the double bar which closes the passage. The whole strain has not been long enough to

tire, but quite long enough to make you glad to listen to something new.

Many people are likely to pass through Lille this season, on their holiday trip; for Lille is on the way to the Rhine and divers other pleasant places. If fond of gardening, they may halt there with advantage for half a day or so. Lille can show gardens untouched by the ruin which has devasted those of Paris. Even supposing the poor Parc Monçeaux put to rights again, who can forget that on that velvet sward so many men were fusillés, beneath that other smooth turf so many more were buried, and though it is said they were taken away, they may be there still; that, on the edge of that flower-border, the wicked old woman sat down, refusing to budge further, saying that if she was to be shot, she might as well be shot there?and she was shot, together with her lame husband, who begged her, by letting him hobble to the Place Vendôme, to prolong his life by the length of that halting pilgrimage. No; the gardens of Paris must still be haunted; their flowers, for a time, must owe their brightness to having been manured with human blood.

Poor Parc Monceaux, once the trimmest of trim Parisian gardens; perhaps the most highly finished horticultural gem in Europe; over-finished even, with the smooth elaborate hardness of a Flemish still-life picture, or a bouquet of porcelain flowers! One looked at it with the same sort of wondering curiosity as is excited by Chinese carvings in ivory, or other efforts of patience that have taken years to accomplish. Give me rather a broad effective sketch by one of our landscape-gardeners, from Capability Brown downwards. But there it was, comparatively small, as one of the public walks in the centre of civilisation; which smallness tempted its managers, instead of making it picturesque, to polish it up to the highest possible pitch, with grass - plots bright as any in the Emerald Isle, the result of perpetual watering with artificial dew, and with expensive plants lavished with a profusion which was called reckless, until it was discovered that the public money might be even more recklessly spent. What say you, for instance, to a bed of caladiums, an oval guessed to be ten yards long by five yards across at the middle, costing to fill it from the most reasonable nurseryman's, not much less than fifty pounds? All that was. Fuit. It is only now beginning to try hard to be once more its former self.

A change, too, has come over Lille and its gardens; but happily it is a change only in name, showing the transitory nature of all things French. Lille, like most important towns, towards the close of the Second Empire, has been considerably demolished, rebuilt, and enlarged. The result, as it stands at present, is a happy combination of the new with the old, still in the way of further completion. Meanwhile, the Rue Napoléon, really a noble street, has become the Rue Nationale, the Boulevard de l'Impératrice is re-christened the Boulevard de la Liberté-O Liberty, what things have men done in thy name!

the Jardin de l'Impératrice is now the Jardin de Vauban, and the Jardin de la Reine Hortense-well, I am not quite sure that the Queen Hortense has been pushed aside to make way for any citoyen or citoyenne. The really old streets and places retain their original names; and towns in this part of France have often droll ones. Lille has a Rue des Chats Bossus, a street of hump-backed cats, while Saint Omer has a Rue de l'Ane Avengle, a blind ass street. Lille also coincides with Saint Omer and Dunkerque (though not quite to so great an extent) in lodging workpeople in cellar dwellings. There are cellar shops, even cellar flower-shops, cellar restaurants, and cellar tippling - places. Doth not Maria retail eatables by platefuls, to be consumed subterraneously on the premises, if such be the true interpretation of "A la Cave Marie on donne à manger par portion ?" Perhaps even this Maria, like Sterne's, may whisper to some favoured customer, "Thou shalt not leave me, Sylvio."

The Grande Place of Lille is the small, but sightly heart and centre which gives the impulse to a wide-spread circulation reaching extremities far beyond the circle of fortifications. On market-days it used to be crowded; but the erection of spacious covered markets in different parts of the town, has relieved it of all inconvenient plethora or congestion. Walk from the Grande Place up the Rue Nap-no, Nationale, and you will come to a public garden, to the right, which is a sort of preface to the other gardens. Enter; look round; and criticise.

The place is nicely kept, in respect to neatness; some of the combinations may be taken as experimental in point of taste, as all gardening must be, more or less. There is a bed of white-leaved centaury, with a broad border of Harry Hieover, a

dwarf geranium much in fashion in Paris before the war, with flowers approaching the orange nasturtium in colour. Mem. I am trying as a substitute for this centaury, both in masses and as a border, a native seaside plant, the horned poppy, Glaucium flavum or luteum, which has white, downy, deep-cut leaves, canaryyellow flowers, and a curious long seedvessel, which gives it its name. This horned poppy, being perfectly hardy, deserves the patronage of amateurs and all whom it may concern. Collect the seed during your seaside strolls; sow in the open ground, and prick out the young plants where they are to remain.

There is a bed of double geraniumsscarlet Gloire de Nancy and pink-faced Madame Lemoinne; but they don't tell as bedding plants. In wet weather, the faded heads of flowers, brown and mouldy, remain upheld by the withered stalks, like used-up quids that had been tossed aside after exhaustion by some brave militaire. The only remedy for this is hand-picking, as soon as the flowers have lost their freshness.

There you behold a bed of pansies whose flowers, singly, are good for little or nothing -ill-shaped, ill-marked, meagre, though of a clear, honest blue-but which are pleasingly effective as a whole, because they are all the same variety, and of the same identical tint. Compare this with any collection of pansies (in which the object is to have the flowers as varied as possible), as seen from a distance, which you may remember beholding, and you will learn though perhaps you knew it before-that mixed and parti-coloured pansies (that is, either of diverse colours in each flower, or a mixture of different self-coloured flowers in the same bed), produce no effect beyond that of a dingy patch upon the grass. To obtain from them any satisfactory result, in masses, you must combine, either in beds or in ribbons, selfs of the same identical hue.

feather pyrethrum, the one above and the other below. How do you like that oval mound of glaucous-green echeveria rosettes, bordered with alternanthera, whose leaves are beginning to assume the hue of badlypickled red cabbage? It is a floral salmagundi, and decidedly curious. What do you think of that fringe of begonias on the shady side of a clump of shrubs? How do you approve of the employment of rhubarb as an ornamental plant? Is it not too suggestive of pudding and tart, to be made conspicuous in a place like this? But as for that, you will see, in the town, angelica grown in boxes as a window plant-and a plant of dignified presence it is.

At the very entrance of the prefatory garden, you may remark both the economy and the appropriateness of doing things well on a large scale and by wholesale. No doubt, both in private and public gardens, you have seen beds and grass-plots bordered by willow branches bent into a low arch by sticking both of their ends in the ground. By planting the foot of one arch in the middle of that preceding it, they are made to overlap each other, and the border becomes continuous. It makes a neat and pretty edging, with the double disadvantage that, if the willow twigs die, they rot, and if they don't die, they grow. In either case, neatness and regularity soon disappear. Here, and in the other Lillois gardens, the walks, beds, and lawns are bordered by a similar edging; only instead of perishable or sprouting willow twigs, it is made of durable cast iron. The colour acquired by exposure to the weather is not unlike that of seasoned bark, and the knots and natural roughnesses are imitated in the castings.

This edging gives great finish to the grounds at an expense which must be moderate, considering the enormous quantity employed. In Paris, not only the Bois de Boulogne, but the Buttes Chaumont, the Parc Monceaux, and other public parks and gardens, were edged with the very same material cast in similar pattern. Miles upon miles of it must have been manufactured for that purpose. It would have been curious to calculate how many hundred thousand tons of metal were then absorbed merely in edging the promenades of Paris.

little maiden crosses with us, a girl of the period and of the place, knitting her own stockings with such absorbed earnestness that the ball of worsted falls from her pocket unobserved, and, sticking in a bush, unrolls a clue which promises to thread the way to some Fair Rosamond's bower. We inform her of the accident; at which she gaily retraces her steps, and succeeds in rewinding her yarn untangled, before it gets broken by passing carts and donkeys. She then calmly resumes her walk and her work, evidently quite as proud of herself as the smart, long-pinafored bourgeois children, sent out to take the air with their attendant bonne.

The area laid out under the invocation of Hortense Beauharnais, is devoted to utility -in unconscious irony of that lady's life, who was supposed to have a predilection for the ornamental. It is chopped up into small patches, which might serve as schoolboys' or old pensioners' gardens, only that every plant is labelled, and you find that the object is, if not exactly botany, at least the recognition of a certain number of plants. And it is good to know the individual aspect of the vegetables which supply those easily convertible articles, poison and medicine henbane, belladonna, bittersweet, nightshade, foxglove; the Socratic, narcotic, large, land hemlock, and the still more virulent water hemlock. It is good to know plants which may be, though they are not commonly, turned to use, and which may be, though prejudice often prevents their being eaten-good King Henry spinach and sowthistle salad, the latter, according to Evelyn, "exceedingly welcome to the late Morocco ambassador," and consumed at the present day with relish in the South of France. I fancy that watercress is the only wild salad eaten in England; on the Continent, the list is of a certain length.

One of the first things Queen Hortense presents you with is a small collection of hardy ferns. There is a Lomaria crenulata, small and pretty, which deserves extended patronage. For the rest, there they are, old familiar friends, "sitting for their pictures,' as they say in jail of a new-come prisoner, to the passing public, most of whom only care to know that the common bracken (not so easy as you may think to transplant into your garden) makes a pleasant and wholesome stuffing for beds; that small fronds of the young male fern fringe the outside of a bouquet with sufficient elegance; and that charcutiers (ham

shop keepers) employ the same to set off cream-cheeses and half-salt sardines. In fact, fern-fronds are the outward and visible sign of the delicacies to be obtained in what we should call "Italian warehouses." Note that some of the names Queen Hortense has given to her ferns, have become a little antiquated, and are not according to Thomas Moore, F.L.S. Never mind that; an acquaintance with synonyms is part of an amateur's bounden duty.

Another road to cross, and you step at once into what was the Jardin de l'Impératrice, until untoward events deprived it, or her, of that honour. For whose was the loss; the garden's or the empress's? It is now Vauban's Garden, the military genius who planned the citadel of Lille and other famous strongholds. To prevent the visitor's making any mistake about the matter, at the very entrance he is confronted by a huge bed of Mrs. Pollock geranium carpeted with blue lobelias, on whose side, facing the entrance, the name of the individual to whose memory this park has been reconsecrated, namely, J. VAUBAN, is horticulturally inscribed in giant letters, composed of sea-green asterisks of echeveria embroidered on a red-brown ground of alternanthera.

Here again we have the Parc Monceaux style carried out with the most elaborate finish; for the town of Lille is passing rich, and willing to spend its money on what it thinks money's worth-and surely a handsome public garden may be included in that category. Workmen are encouraged to 'fiddle away their time" on minutiae that would elsewhere be disregarded. Look at that stalwart fellow in a blue linen coat, cutting the narrow grass border with his pocket-knife. He will not have one blade of grass anywhere a quarter of an inch longer than another elsewhere. Observe that border of Géant des Batailles roses, with every branch pegged down close to the ground, so that the flowers look like big red daisies peeping just above the dark green foliage. Opposite are borders of Souvenir de Mal maison and Aimée Vibert (both white roses), treated in the same way. The effect is pretty; but what endless pegging and trimming it necessitates! High keeping is spread over the place, like a mantle. Nevertheless, certain overworked points made me think of a perfectly-clipped poodle dog, with his close-shorn reins, his curly mane, and the imperial tuft at the tip of his tail.

Analogous in design and execution is