and form, and yet touched with poetic feeling. In these warm meadows we wandered until nightfall. We looked at the old Meols Hall, now a farm-house, where, in the days of Queen Mary, lived a certain Dame Mary Hesketh, who in later times was cast into prison for making converts to the 'papist faythe;' we noted the lovely colour of the budding willowswhich are everywhere about, bending back from the sea in groves and in hedgerows-a soft, light brown, with a touch of pink in it, harmonising perfectly with the spring sky; we found our first daisies in the grass, and the little shepherd's-purse on the banks; and then, turning westward, we could see the undulating dunes of sand, a strip of the blue estuary, and a fleet of boats laid up for the weekly rest from labour. The costumes of the locality are still fine-quite Breton in character. The men have not learned the hateful prison-fashion of cropping their heads; they have their hair long and wear bright blue jerseys. The women are stalwart, solid, 'dour' persons; they still keep to the short petticoat, and have lilac hoods, with stiff, outstanding frills; and both their hands and faces tell of hard life by land and sea. APRIL. Proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, SHAKSPERE, Sonnets, xcviii. And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England-now! ROBERT BROWNING, Home Thoughts from Abroad. XII.-MID-LENT AND ALL FOOLS'. April 3. 'COMES in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb,' is the old saw about the month of March. Whatever rude and leonine blasts he might have indulged in during his early days, certainly his going out had nothing in it of a lamb-like character. I do not remember a pleasanter or a more seasonable March than this has been; but the last day of it was one of the vilest of the year-a bitter, biting, inclement, and dreary day. Every half hour there was a wild drift of sleet, and the frost was just severe enough to put that thin coating of ice on pond and pool which gives you a sense of uncomfortable starving such as you don't get even in a much lower temperature. Cheerless, however, as the day was out of doors, we made the night cheerful enough within. We had a roaring coal fire and sat round it, remembering that it was the festival of Mid-lent. Our ancestors certainly deserve much credit for their ingenuity in devising of festivals. Shakspere's 'merry Shrovetide' is hardly out of sight before we find ourselves baiting, as it were, by the way at a little intermedial feast-a feast in the middle of a fast. Of course we partook of that mysterious cakesimanellus, simnel, or simblin—the last is our ordinary Lancashire pronunciation-whose history and the etymology of whose name are both vague enough to form the subject of constant warfare among our antiquarian pundits. Also, we compounded and passed round as a loving-cup the proper beverage for the day, the ancient braggat-bragawd of the Welsh-ancient as Chaucer Hir mouth was sweete as bragat is or meth E more ancient still, for is it not found some eight centuries earlier in Taliesin and Aneurin ? I do not profess to have any great skill in these matters, but I think our braggat was fairly mixed, and a right pleasant drink. The curious may care to know that it consists of new-laid eggs well beaten, sugar or honey, hot ale, and a dash of nutmeg or other spice. I suppose it must be something like that 'egg-hot,' of which dear old Lamb was so fond, and to which he makes such frequent allusion. Writing to Coleridge, he says: 'I have been drinking egghot and smoking Oronooko, associated circumstances which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and nights at the Salutation. This festival, besides being known as Simnel Sunday, Mid-Lent Sunday, and Braggat Sunday, is also called by the singular name of Mothering Sunday. The designation had probably a purely ecclesiastical origin; but in later times it fitted itself to a pleasant social observance, and in country places the day is still known as a time when children revisit their parents, taking with them as a gift a simnel or other confection. Herrick, in one of his many poems addressed to Dianeme, alludes to this custom : I'le to thee a simnell bring, Half that blessing thou'lt give me. During the latter half of last month there has been frost nearly every night, the thermometer being often down to twenty-five degrees; but as a compensation, we have had bracing air and much noble sky-. scenery :—the half moon riding through those undulating fields of white and grey cloud which make the most capacious-looking heaven we ever see; or the sun, setting large and bright in a translucent westpale green and of infinite depth and barred only by a few streaks of violet cloud—or overhung sometimes by threatening masses of vapour which are best described in the old Bible-phrase as like 'garments rolled in blood.' The changes of temperature have been very great, and show what we have to prepare ourselves for during what we are pleased to call spring weather. In the afternoon of one day the thermometer rose to 51 in the sun; while it had been down in the previous night to nineteen degrees. It is wonderful how well the birds stand the cold. Going out on starry nights before the moon had risen, and walking without noise under a high bank, I have seen them sitting in the bare hedge against the sky by five or six |