It is very available for household decoration, with its four great creamy petals,flowers they are not, but floral involucres,each with a fantastic curl and stain at its tip, as if the fireflies had alighted on them and scorched them; and yet I like it best as it peers out in barbaric splendor from the delicate green of young Maples.

By the end of this month, most of the species had ripened their seeds, but undecayed, still seemed to be in bloom from the numerous corolla-like involucres and whorls of chaffy scales of the composite.

Pinnæ triangular-ovate, usually distant, the ends of the rounded lobes reflexed and forming separate involucres which are pushed back by the ripening sporangia.

Yet the practice cannot be sheer suicide, when the Dutch peasant-girl plods bloomingly through her daily duties beneath a dozen successive involucres of flannel.

But at a time when dyeing, spinning, and weaving were, if not in the one hand, yet at any rate intimately connected with one another in the narrow circle of a home industry, the appearance of this beautiful gold-yellow plant, heaped up in large masses, would be very likely to suggest its immortalization in textile art, because the drawing is very faithful to nature in regard to the thorny involucre.