new book.  All the girls had them, with neat marbled covers, and white paper within, and each one was determined to make hers the best of the whole.  When pasting day came, there was an intense excitement.  We all daubed our little fingers to our heart’s content, and our faces too, as to that.  I remember perfectly the sensation of smiling, after the paste stiffened.  We spattered our desks, and pasted the wrong side of the flowers, and stuck the leaves together, and got every thing a little one-sided, and, in short, became so worried and heated and vexed, that we did not hunt for any more flowers for a long time after the first pasting day.

In the mean while my ideas had undergone a change.  I had become much more ambitious.  A hew page brings flowers of a higher order, and, beneath them, besides the common name, appears a sounding botanical title; ay, still more, the class and order are written in full.  Poor things!  How many of your species must have been pulled to pieces by inexperienced hands, to ascertain the exact number of stamens, and their relative positions!  I feel, now, a tenderness for the shrinking, delicate wild flowers, that makes me hesitate even to pick them from their shady retreats; but then, such was my ardor for investigation, the more I loved them, and the more beautiful they seemed, the more eagerly I tore them to fragments.  Let the ingenious student analyze bits of brass wire, and reduce to its simple elements as much gunpowder as he pleases, but I raise my voice against this wanton destruction of rare and beautiful flowers.  No chemical process can ever restore them.

As I glance over this new page, I see a merry troop of little girls, crowding around their kind teacher, trying to restrain their superabundant spirits, and restless activity, till they may give them free scope in the woods.  Passing up the street, they are joined by fresh recruits, who come dancing out of the houses, with baskets, and trowels, and tin boxes, and delightfully mysterious suppers packed away nicely, to be eaten in the most romantic place that can be found,—­provided there is no danger of snakes, or ivy.  Where they are going I should find it impossible to say, until I have consulted the new leaf just turned over.  Here, side by side, are the wild Columbine and the cheerful little Bethlehem Star.  They grew, I remember, upon Powder-House Hill, so named from the massive granite building upon its summit, which we never dared to go near, for fear of an explosion.  The hill was rough, rocky, barren, and in some places quite steep.  In the clefts of the rocks, generally far above our reach, the bright red columbines stood in groups, drooping their graceful heads.  Some of the rocks were worn to a perfect polish by the feet of daring sliders.  It was a dangerous pastime even to the most experienced.  A loss of balance, a slight deviation from the beaten track, a trip in a hollow, or a momentary entanglement in your dress,—­and you are lost!  I