When the woman came to herself, she said that, suddenly looking up, she saw a female face with an agonized expression looking in at her from the window. On being asked if it was any one whom she knew, she replied that the face seemed familiar, but that she could not recall the name that belonged to it. After reflection she said that it looked like a daughter of hers whom she had not seen since she was a child. The girl had been brought up by a lady in another State, and was now a married woman, living in Vermont.
About a week afterward, Martha received a letter from the lady who had brought up her daughter, informing her that the young woman had recently died after a short illness, and that her great anxiety seemed to be to see her mother before she died. Some time after I wrote to the town indicated to ascertain the exact time of the young woman's death. The husband had moved away immediately after the funeral, but the town clerk replied that a person of the name mentioned had died there about the time mentioned in my letter. Here came the fatal gap in the evidence, which always seems to prevent the chain being perfect. If I could have obtained a certificate of the death having occurred on the day of the snow-storm, I should have found myself nearer to a ghost than I ever expect to be again till I become one myself. S.C. CLARKE.
Treatises on the "language of flowers" should, to be complete, give a chapter on their political significance. England had her War of the Roses; and of this contest a mild travesty may possibly be furnished in a French "Strife of the Flowers". The violet is the Bonapartist badge, and when, last spring, the emperor died in exile, and his partisans sought to show some outward token of their fidelity to his memory and his cause, violets began to bloom profusely in buttonholes as the half disguised emblem of the outlawed party. But there was one unexpected result of this demonstration, for in republican Marseilles the flower-merchants found their trade in violets declining, owing to the popular distrust of this once favorite and unassuming flower. It is almost incredible that the third city of France should have so thrown down the gauntlet to one of the sweetest gifts of Nature. But if upon the innocent violet is to be heaped the curse of Sedan, then when Bourbonism lifts its abashed head are lilies to be proscribed in the Lyons market as violets were darkly suspected in Marseilles? And if the radicals should make the red poppy their symbol, would it in turn be scorned by the lovers of the lily? If so, with the numerous parties, new and old, in France, what flower could a Frenchman wear or cultivate without danger of being mobbed by the partisans of some other emblem in politics?
