Not the least beautiful among our native wild flowers are many of those which grow, too often unheeded, along the wayside of every country road. The hedge-bordered highway on which I am walking to-day, to take my letters to the village post, is bordered on either side with such a profusion of colour as one may never see equalled during many years\' experience of tropical or sub-tropical lands. Jamaica and Ceylon could produce nothing so brilliant as this tangled mass of gorse, and thistle, and St. John\'s-wort, and centaury, intermingled with the lithe and whitening sprays of half-opened clematis. And here, on the very edge of the road, half-smothered in its grey dust, I have picked a pretty little convolvulus blossom, with a fly buried head-foremost in its pink bell; and I am carrying them both along with me as I go, for contemplation and study. For this little flower, the lesser bindweed, is rich in hints as to the strange ways in which Nature decks herself with so much waste loveliness, whose meaning can only be fully read by the eyes of man, the latest comer among her children. The old school of thinkers imagined that beauty was given to flowers and insects for the sake of man alone: it would not, perhaps, be too much to say that, if the new school be right, the beauty is not in the flowers and insects themselves at all, but is read into them by the fancy of the human race. To the butterfly the world is a little beautiful; to the farm-labourer it is only a trifle more beautiful: but to the cultivated man or the artist it is lovely in every cloud and shadow, in every tiny blossom and passing bird.

The outer face of the bindweed, the exterior of the cup, so to speak, is prettily marked with five dark russet-red bands, between which the remainder of the corolla is a pale pinky-white in hue. Nothing could be simpler and prettier than this alternation of dark and light belts; but how is it produced? Merely thus. The convolvulus blossom in the bud is twisted or contorted round and round, part of the cup being folded inside, while the five joints of the corolla are folded outside, much after the fashion of an umbrella when rolled up. And just as the bits of the umbrella which are exposed when it is folded become faded in colour, so the bits of the bindweed blossom which are outermost in the bud become more deeply oxidised than the other parts, and acquire a russet-red hue. The belted appearance which thus results is really as accidental, if I may use that unphilosophical expression, as the belted appearance of the old umbrella, or the wrinkles caused by the waves on the sea-sands. The flower happened to be folded so, and got coloured, or discoloured, accordingly. But when a man comes to look at it, he recognises in the alternation of colours and the symmetrical arrangement one of those elements of beauty with which he is familiar in the handicraft of his own kind. He reads an intention into this result of natural causes, and personifies Nature as though she worked with an ?sthetic design in view, just as a decorative artist works when he similarly alternates colours or arranges symmetrical and radial figures on a cup or other piece of human pottery. The beauty is not in the flower itself; it is in the eye which sees and the brain which recognises the intellectual order and perfection of the work.

I turn the bindweed blossom mouth upward, and there I see that these russet marks, though paler on the inner surface, still show faintly through the pinky-white corolla. This produces an effect not unlike that of a delicate shell cameo, with its dainty gradations of semi-transparent white and interfusing pink. But the inner effect can be no more designed with an eye to beauty than the outer one was; and the very terms in which I think of it clearly show that my sense of its loveliness is largely derived from comparison with human handicraft. A farmer would see in the convolvulus nothing but a useless weed; a cultivated eye sees in it just as much as its nature permits it to see. I look closer, and observe that there are also thin lines running from the circumference to the centre, midway between the dark belts. These lines, which add ............