"cong-ka-rees," in the thickets of button-bush (Cephalanthus occidentalis, L.), where the river in its sluggish course embraces the little islets. The chirping of myriad insects adds to the ceaseless hum which attends the onward march of summer.

The gates of life are now opened wide and the l'ia Estiva is crowded with the gay throng that fills its every nook and corner and yet moves steadily forward to the accompaniment of Nature's music, the song of birds, the rippling of innumerable brooks, the murmuring of the wind among the branches, and the fluttering of multitudinous leaves.

There have been many famous processions in the world's history, the story of which, where preserved, the world loves to linger over. In the mind's eye we can still see Solomon, accompanied by the elders of Israel and all the heads of the tribes, the chief of the fathers of the children of Israel, going down to the city. of David, which is Zion, to bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord, with the sound of trumpets and cymbals, unto Jerusalem, to the great and magnificent temple which he had there builded. Lilies still bloom in the fields of Palestine and they, too, have their glory. We seem to hear the Great Teacher, as He sits on the mountain side, saying to the multitude: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet Solomon in all his glory

was not arrayed like one of these." We turn the pages of Pindar, and again the victors in the Olympic games are returning home in triumph, bearing the wreath of wild olive, having won for themselves and their native city an imperishable name. In imagination we may stand in the Forum at Rome and see some great proconsul returning victorious from a foreign war:-it may be Scipio Africanus fresh from the conquest of Carthage after the second Punic war, or Æmilius Paullus with Perseus, king of Macedon, in his train, or Caius Julius Cæsar, "the laurelled scholar, the sun-bright intellect," "the foremost man of all this world," celebrating four triumphs at once because his life has been too busy to celebrate separately his successes in Gaul, in Egypt, in Pontus and in Numidia:-they pass in splendor along the Sacred Way and up the Sacred Hill, offering in the magnificent display of silver and gold and precious. stones and other treasures of the vanquished lands such gorgeous spectacles as the world has rarely witnessed. There have been coronation pageants and royal progresses, not a few, through the streets of capital cities; processions of the elect of a nation, like that of the States General of France at the beginning of the Revolution, so vividly described in Carlyle's pages, or like that, to which no pen but Macaulay's could do justice, at the opening of the High Court of Parliament which was to sit in judgment upon Warren Hastings. Yet,

ΙΟ

The clouds, like stately argosies, move slowly across the summer sky, and the cloud-shadows darken the green hillsides and the deep meadows, where the tall grasses are bending in long waves under the gentle breeze. Swallows, on unwearied wing, are floating in wide circles in the upper regions of the air or are skimming the flashing surface of the pool in the intricate. mazes of their flight. A flock of redwing-blackbirds,