There is still a younger chorister in New York, Charles Arthur Bradley, who was a member of Calvary Church (New York) choir when he was eight years old, but who has been taken out of active work for special voice-training. He has not yet arrived at the dignity of his tenth birthday, but sings many of the familiar sacred arias and all of the service with wonderful sureness and beauty of tone. He has already sung ballads at private musicales, and objects to the restraint from his choir work; but his teacher will permit no public appearance until he has reached a more mature age.

As far as I have seen, the race for first place in the spring pageant of flowers results in a tie. If you find a Mayflower just peeping open on the edge of a wood, you are pretty sure to see a nodding blue hepatica on the same day. The time of year varies, of course, as you go farther north, and with the particular season; but it is a good plan to be on the lookout for these two flowers, the leaders of the procession, as early as the first warm days in April.

The Mayflower (Epigæa repens), also called trailing arbutus and ground-laurel, belongs to the heath family, of which the rhododendron, the blueberry, and the English heather also are members. Every one knows its lovely, shell-like pink-and-white flowers, and its delicate fragrance, the first and most exquisite breath of the spring.

It is a little trailing plant with a tough, rusty stem and heart-shaped leaves very thickly netted, of a rather dull light green. The flowers grow in clusters. They are gamopetalous; that is, instead of having five petals, as one would think, there is really but one petal-a slender tube opening out into five points. They vary from pure white to a deep rose-pink.

Look first along the southern edge of a wood, on some bank or hillside facing the sun and sheltered from all the cold north winds. You will be pretty sure at last to see a little white star, and then a cluster of pink buds.

A few days later you will find them blossoming thickly through the places that they like best of all-fields of dead, dry grass, and brown

hummocky pastures.

Here you will probably find the pinkest ones, usually one plant by itself that for some reason has deep-rose colored flowers, while all its neighbors are in appleblossom pink and white. The dark-pink Mayflowers are much prized, but they are hardly more beautiful than the pure white ones, which blossom deep in the woods long after their sisters in the fields have withered. These Mayflowers growing in the woods have a character of their own: the plant is usually thin and straggling, not compact like those in the open field; the leaves are large and very green, and the large white flowers are apt to come singly instead of in thick clusters.

But, wherever you try to find Mayflowers, you must know how to look for them. When you see a flower, follow the stem carefully, and you will find that it brings up with it half a dozen pink clusters that were wholly hidden. Only sometimes after a warm spring rain the little flowers seem to come out to drink, and where the day before you could scarcely find one you will see hundreds.

Take two good

And a word about how to pick them. The stems are very tough. You try to break them, then to twist them; then you give a pull, and up the whole thing comes. things with you on your spring walks-patience and a penknife; and don't, because you like Mayflowers, destroy the little plants that might give so much pleasure to you and to other people year after year.

As I said, the hepatica (Hepatica triloba, crowfoot family) blossoms at the same time as the Mayflower. It is a beautiful little fivepetaled flower (botanically speaking, what appear to be petals are really sepals, that is, divisions of the calyx, the hepatica having no true petals) set on a slim, graceful stem. It varies very much in color (the buds are of a deeper tint than the open blossoms) from white to purple and purplish pink, and sometimes to