weed. The pine-tree is the fat or resinous tree
from the Sanscrit word pina, fat. Syringo is
called the pipe-tree, its stalks being used as pipe-
sticks. Lolium perenne being supposed to be
intoxicating, is called ray grass, from the French
ivraie, drunken. Gryphora, an eatable lichen, on
which Sir John Franklin and his companions
subsisted in Arctic America, is called rocktripe.
Rowan or roan-tree, means the charmed tree of
which the Scotch couplet says, "Roan-tree and
red thread Haud the witches a' in dread."
Sainfoin is wholesome hay. Saucealone is sauce-
garlic. Service tree yielded a fruit of which
cervisia, a kind of beer, was made. Equisetum
hyemale was called pewterwort, from its being
used to clean pewter; and shavegrass, because
the fletchers and combmakers polished their work
with it. Verbascum thapsus is called hig taper
and torch, because the stalks were dipped in suet
to burn at funerals. Wheat is white-eating or
grain. Carpinus betulus, hornbeam, is called
the yoke elm, yokes being made of it. The
word "yoke," says Dr. Prior, to whom the
reader is indebted for everything valuable or
interesting which I have submitted to him on
the popular names of British plants, "has been
brought hither by our ancestors in their
migrations from Central Asia, where it has always
borne the same name, meaning, connexion, or
coupling. . . . Other nations of common descent
with us have a similar name for this useful
implement, derived from the Sanscrit jug, bind,
and showing the spread of civilisation from the
same centre, and the early and continued possession
of the animal that, next to the dog, has been
the most constant companion of civilised man in
all his migrations, the ox and the use of it in
pairs or couples."

MONSIEUR CASSECRUCHE'S
INSPIRATION.

MONSIEUR ÆNEAS EGLANTINE CASSECRUCHE,
Au-quatrième, No. 23 Bolshoi Moskoi, St.
Petersburg, was at the end of his Latin—or,
to use a thoroughly English idiom, he had not
a penny to bless himself with.

The gentleman in question was the solitary
member left, of a company of French actors
that had come to Russia in 1840. The rest
had returned to France, leaving their gay
companion like a piece of light drift that has
washed up beyond reach of the return tide;
like a butterfly that has ventured out too late
in the autumn, and got nipped with the frost.

M. Cassecruche had tried to draw teeth, but
had failed to earn enough to keep his own grinders
going. He had tried to teach drawing, but his
advertisements had drawn no one; he had
ventured at scene-painting, and the manager had
kicked him out of the theatre. He had speculated
on the turf, but betting with no capital leads to
inadequate results. He had taught Italian, but
as he knew no Russian, and could not pronounce
Italian, his pupils made scarcely sufficient
progress. He went on the Moscow stage, and
the theatre instantly closed, as if in sheer spite.
He had thought the Russians rich fools, and
easily cheated, but he had found them sharp
rogues, neglectful of all true talent. So, now,
in his vexation he wished to go back to France,
as his creditors grew daily more pressing, and
the horrible Russian winter was rapidly
setting in.

It was the thirtieth day of October, and the
city of St. Peter was entirely intent on check-
mating the coming winter. Here were men
everywhere putting up double window-sashes,
filling up the intermediate spaces with salt or
sand, and pasting paper over every chink. Doors
were being hammered into place; the great
white porcelain stoves, reaching from ceiling to
floor, were being scraped out and overhauled,
and their flues and pipes calked and soldered for
the winter campaign. It was quite alarming to
a needy thin-clad stranger, to see the mountains
of white-barked birch-logs being piled up in the
court-yards, or being tossed out of the enormous
wood barges on the Neva. In the suburbs, the
servants were drawing out the sledges, examining
their steel runners, and gossiping about the
fun of the snow time. The great iron fireplaces
for the coachmen outside the Winter Palace
and the Opera House now assumed a look of
terrible significancy. People were talking of the
bridges being soon removed. All the tailors in St.
Petersburg were busily preparing and altering
fur coats for officers and civilians. There was
a hard time coming, and M. Cassecruche knew it.

But how to get away from thirty-two hungry
creditors, and a suspicious government watching
him, and only three sous in his pocket, was
the difficulty. Thirteen Napoleons to Paris,
through Poland and Prussia. Half as much by
Yorkshire steamer to perfidious Albion. "Hein!"

One miserable October day M. Cassecruche
sat in his dreary apartment and pondered over his
difficulties. It was a doleful wet day. A wind
from Siberia had blown over the marshes, and
given an acidity to the rain that drenched the
streets, and frothed down from every spout.
M. Cassecruche sat at his table, drew on the
back of a letter countless ballet-dancers, and
finished off with a gigantic head of the Emperor
Nicholas. M. Cassecruche arose and lighted a
cigarette; the smoke curled up in sharp cut blue
circles; it was incense offered to his Good
Genius.

"Ha! ma belle France, how I grieve for
thee; how I regard thee, a poor exile from thy
paradise!" exclaimed M. Cassecruche, rhapsodising
aloud. "Ma foi, how I am hungry. Pon!
pon! there goes a champagne cork at the
execrable next door. Ha! now I smell the stew.
Gracious Heavens! what torment to smell a
stew which is not by oneself to be eaten. O,
what veritable agony for the poor exile from
beautiful France! But stop. I raise my gun.
I fire. I bring down an idea—a magnificent
majestic idea. My good genius has returned to
me—to me, rising from the vapour of a stew.
M. Cassecruche, I congratulate you. Courage,