Aunt C. Very like boy and girl, I must say.
Kate. I know a little verse about the Butterfly.
Aunt C. Then, pray, let us hear it, my dear.

BUTTERFLIES.

Butterflies are pretty things,
Prettier than you or I;

See the colours on his wings,-
Who would hurt a Butterfly?

Softly, softly, girls and boys;

He'll come near us by-and-by;
Here he is, don't make a noise,-
We'll not hurt you, Butterfly.

Not to hurt a living thing

Let all little children try;
See, again he 's on the wing;

Good-bye, pretty Butterfly!

E. FOLLEN.

Aunt C. Thank you, Katie; they are very pretty. Here are some rather more difficult verses by Samuel Rogers, of whom you will hear a great deal when you come to read memoirs of the society of the early half of this century. He was born in 1763, and died in 1855, having for many years kept a house in London, with a most choice collection of pictures and beautiful

things, and where he gave breakfasts, at which all the cleverest and wittiest people of the day met, and said clever things. He wrote a volume of poems, the most famous of which was "Pleasures of Memory."

TO THE BUTTERFLY.

Child of the Sun! pursue thy rapturous flight,
Mingling with her thou lov'st in fields of light;
And, where the flowers of Paradise unfold,
Quaff fragrant nectar from their cups of gold.
There shall thy wings, rich as an evening sky,
Expand and shut with silent ectasy!

Yet wert thou once a worm, a thing that crept
On the bare earth, then wrought a tomb and slept.
And such is man; soon from his cell of clay

To burst, a seraph, in the blaze of day.

S. ROGERS.

Alice. They are pretty lines, and I like their dwelling on the Butterfly's change being like the Resurrection.

Aunt C. I wish, however, that he had not said, Burst, a seraph, in the blaze of day." The Seraphim are amongst the highest of angels, and there is no authority for thinking we shall be changed into angels.

Grace. Please, Aunt Charlotte, read us the verses our Grandmamma wrote when she saw the Butterfly upon a baby's grave, through the church door, during the singing.

Aunt C. Sept. 15th, 1838-forty-two years ago.

While on the ear the solemn note

Of prayers and praises heavenward float,
A Butterfly, with brilliant wings,
A lesson full of meaning brings,

There on an infant's grave it stands,

Lo, it hath burst its shroud's dull bands;
Its vile worm's body there is left,

Of gross earth's habits now berest,

It soars into the sky.

Thus when the grave her dead shall give,
The little form below shall live;

It shall put on a robe of white,

And, decked in garments shining bright,

To realms above shall fly.

Alice. Katie looks as if we had brought her to very grave thoughts.

Grace. Not sad, but glad, really; are not they?

Aunt C. So glad, that they need not hinder us from

enjoying some playful lines written by a nameless author on the funeral of the very Butterfly who gave the ball. The drawing is made to suit them.

THE BUTTERFLY'S FUNERAL.

Oh ye who so lately were blithesome and gay,
At the Butterfly's banquet carousing away,
Your feasts and your revels of pleasure are fled,
For the chief of the banquet, the Butterfly's dead.

No longer the Flies and the Emmets advance
To join with their friends in the Grasshopper's dance;
For see his fine form o'er the favourite bend,
And the Grasshopper mourn for the loss of his friend.

And hark to the funeral dirge of the Bee,
And the Beetle, who follows as solemn as he;
And see, where so mournful the green rushes wave,
The Mole is preparing the Butterfly's grave.

The Dormouse attended, but cold and forlorn,
And the Gnat slowly winded his shrill little horn,
And the Moth, being grieved at the loss of a sister,
Bent over her body and silently kissed her.

The corpse was embalmed at the set of the sun,
And enclosed in a case which the Silk-worm had spun;
By the help of the Hornet the coffin was laid
On a bier out of myrtle and jessamine made.