to Alps and Sanctuaries 281

of delight to advertise Somebody and Someone's pianos and
holding the loud pedal solidly down all the time. Her family
had always been unsympathetic about her music. They said
it was like a loose bundle of fire-wood which you never can
get across the room without dropping sticks; they said she
would have been so much better employed doing anything
else.

Fancy being in the room with her while she was strumming
about and hunting after her chord ! Fancy being in heaven
vith her when she had found it!

Introduction of Foreign Plants

I have brought back this year some mountain auriculas and
the seed of some salvia and Fusio tiger-lily, and mean to
plant the auriculas and to sow the seeds in Epping Forest and
elsewhere round about London. I wish people would more
generally bring back the seeds of pleasing foreign plants and
introduce them broadcast, sowing them by our waysides and
in our fields, or in whatever situation is most likely to suit
them. It is true, this would puzzle botanists, but there is no
reason why botanists should not be puzzled. A botanist is a
person whose aim is to uproot, kill and exterminate every
plant that is at all remarkable for rarity or any special virtue,
and the rarer it is the more bitterly he will hunt it down.

Saint Cosimo and Saint Damiano at Siena

Sano di Pietro shows us a heartless practical joke played by
these two very naughty saints, both medical men, who should
be uncanonised immediately. It seems they laid their heads
together and for some reason, best known to themselves, re-
solved to cut a leg off a dead negro and put it on to a white
man. In the one compartment they are seen in high glee
cutting the negro's leg off. In the next they have gone to the
white man who is in bed, obviously asleep, and are substituting
the black leg for his own. Then, no doubt, they will stand
behind the door and see what he does when he wakes. They
must be saints because they have glories on, but it looks as
though a glory is not much more to be relied on than a gig as
a test of respectability. [1889.]