THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS.

IT was a Mt. Pleasant girl. No other human divinity could play such a heartless trick on an admiring, nay, an adoring and adorable, young man. He always praised the flowers she wore, and talked so learnedly about flowers in general, that this incredulous young angel “put up a job” on him—if one may be so sacrilegious as to write slang in connection with so much beauty and grace. She filled the bay window with freshly potted weeds which she had laboriously gathered from the sidewalk and in the hollow under the bridge, and when he came round that evening she led the conversation to flowers, and her admirer to the bay window. “Such lovely plants she had,” she told him, and he just clasped his hands and looked around him in silly ecstasy, trying to think of their names.

“That is Patagonia influenses, Mr. Bogundus,” she said, pointing to the miserable cheat of a young rag-weed; “did you ever see any thing so delicate?”

“Oh!” he ejaculated, regarding it reverentially; “beautiful, beautiful; what delicately serrated leaves!”

“And,” she went on, with a face as angelic as though she was only saying “Now I lay me down to sleep,” “it breaks out in the Summer in such curious green blossoms, clinging to long, slender stems. Only think of that—green blossoms.” And she gazed pensively on the young man as though she saw something green that probably never would blossom.

“Wonderful, wonderful indeed,” he said, “one can never tire of botany. It continually opens to us new worlds of wonders with every awakening flower and unfolded leaf.”

“And here,” she said, indicating with her snowy finger a villainous sprout of that little bur the boys call “beggar’s lice,” “this Mendicantis parasitatis, what——”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, rapturously, “where did you get it? Why, do you know how rare it is? I have not seen one in Burlington since Mrs. O’Gheminie went to Chicago. She had such beautiful species of them; such a charming variety. She used to wear them in her hair so often.”

“No doubt,” the angel said dryly; and the young man feared he had done wrong in praising Mrs. O’Gheminie’s plants so highly. But the dear one went on, and pointing to a young jimson weed, said:

“This is my pet, this Jimsonata filiofensis.”

The young man gasped with the pleasure of a true lover of flowers, as he bent over it in admiration and inhaled its nauseous odor. Then he rose up and said:

“This plant has some medicinal properties.”

“Ah!” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, stiffly, “it has. I have smelt that plant in my boyhood days. Wilted on the kitchen stove, then bruised and applied to the eruption, the leaves are excellent remedial agents for the poison of the ivy.” He strode past the smiling company that gathered in the parlor, and said sternly, “We meet no more!” and, seizing her father’s best hat from the rack, he extinguished himself in it, and went banging along the line of tree-boxes which lined his darkened way.