blind person round your garden on a genial
sunshiny day, and he will tell you at once,

                Spring is coming; Spring is coming;
                Hark! the little bee is humming.

Nor is the bee needful to give the information.
His own sensations serve to apprise him that the
sun is climbing rapidly up the ecliptic. Every
sound, ringing more clearly than heretofore, tells
him that there is more space in the atmosphere;
the thick heavy curtain of mist and fog is
upraised and withdrawn, at least temporarily and
partially; there is an odorous freshness in the
air; the earth feels firmer under his tread,
promising a supply of that March dust a bushel of
which is worth a king's ransom. The lower
creatures, even the sightless worm, manifest an
instinctive foretaste of the coming change.
Winter is quite inadequate to repress the elastic
energies of Spring. Under the tardy snow the
pansy will blossom, the strawberry plants will
prepare their flowers. To retard the growth and
blooming of plants much behind their due season,
is one of the more difficult problems in gardening.
A tyro is able to forward them; he can show you
moss roses in May; but he cannot show you lilies
of the valley in August; while not a few clever
gardeners are able to supply you, at the cost of x
(the unknown quantity) shillings per pound, with
fresh ripe grapes on New Year's Day. Spring
is thus a high-mettled racer whom you may spur
on to almost any pace, but whom you cannot
keep lagging at the starting-post when once his
rival steeds are off and away.

Without being sensitive to the manifestations
of the newly discovered primordial power, Od (if
the discovery be made), without pretending to
see in utter darkness, to perceive that our friend's
hands and heads are phosphorescent, to distinguish
the north from the south pole of a magnet
by the touch only, to behold luminous clouds
emanate from a bell as long as it is kept ringing,
with the rest of the catalogue of odic impressions
—many persons are able to divine the state of
things around them, by their feelings. The
impression of season and of weather is particularly
lasting. A bright Spring day never comes to
greet you without being accompanied by a tail
of memories of the spring days of other times and
localities; how you looked over the precipice on
the Island of Capri, whence Tiberius tossed his
dishonoured victims; how you gathered bouquets
of vernal squills in the chesnut groves of Tuscany;
how you awoke to the sounds of curious chimes
as the sun rose over Belgian cities; how the
salmon in highland streams refused your ill-
thrown fly, and what an electric shock it gave
you to feel you had hooked a fish at last. On no
stronger thread than an April breeze, may
hundreds of such pearls be strung.

Altitude, again—a small difference of altitude
—is a physical condition which affects the
sensorial faculties, and awakes the reminiscences of
many persons. Have you no antipathy to a
bedroom on the ground-floor? Even in a house
on the top of a hill, do you not prefer, as a
lodging by night, and perhaps by day, the first
floor to the one below? In the fifth or sixth
story of a Paris house—Alphonse Karr talks of
dwelling in the fourteenth, in the days of his
youth—do you ever lose the consciousness of
your elevation, or suppose yourself in the
entresol? Ladies long resident in cities,
accustomed to go up-stairs to the drawing-room,
feel comparatively out of their element in one
which allows them to step at once into a flower-
garden without breaking their necks from a
balcony.

At the watershed, the topmost ridge of any
lofty mountain pass—the St. Gothard or the
Simplon—do you not recognise sensations similar
to those experienced at the top of other
mountain passes? Nay, more; the analogies
which physical geographers have established
between altitude and latitude are confirmed by
yourself in the counties of Caithness and Wick,
on comparing your bodily impressions there with
those experienced in the uplands of Bavaria,
before making the grand plunge from it, down to
the Tyrol and Italy. A considerable elevation
above the sea is betrayed by certain indescribable
personal hints, as surely as it is a sign of change
of weather when old Betty's joints are on the
rack.

Spring is not only a Season; Spring is a Force,
which begins to manifest itself at an earlier
period, and in more out-of-the-way places than
very many people suspect. The phenomena
occurring on and about St. Valentine's Day are
unmistakable symptoms that something unusual
is in the wind. Birds don't choose their mates,
nor are postage-stamps purchased by millions,
for nothing. But who would look for the first
signs of the coming Spring, at the bottom of
rivers, lakes, and ditches? The mysterious
influence, nevertheless, penetrates the bed of
waters, and works unsuspected at the preparation
of next summer's crop—of weeds?—no;
grant them the dignity of aquatic plants. Before
the Sun has walked into the Ram, the water-lily
has thought of unfolding new leaves, and the
water-soldier bedecks himself with starry green
cockades. The start of growth once made, there
is no further stoppage or check; spring frosts
cannot penetrate the liquid mantle which
envelopes their tender foliage; the malignant rays of
the "red moon"—the moon which scowls on
and blights the earth between the Paschal and
the Pentacostal moons—are powerless to injure,
when they reach the bottom of the gliding
stream.

This unseen vivifying force is especially
manifested in things that are invisible to the
multitude. Early Spring, the moment of nature's
revival, is the time to search for protozoa,
creatures who represent the earliest dawn, the very
first beginnings of animated life. Submit this
droplet of ditch water to your microscope,
with a magnifying power of from two hundred
and twenty to two hundred and fifty
diameters, and you see—what? A bit of clear,