grim delight, and chanted the glories of the Valhalla waiting for heroes
who should forever quaff the "foaming, pure, and shining mead" from
skulls of foes in battle slain. Some crossed the sea, and on

"that pale, that white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back tho ocean's swelling
tide,"

they reared a sinewy and stalwart race, whose "morning drum-beat
encircles the world."

And History taught Ivy to reverence man.

But there was one respect in which Ivy was both pupil and teacher.
Never a word of Botany had fallen upon her ears; but through all the
unconscious bliss of infancy, childhood, and girlhood, for sixteen happy
years, she had lived among the flowers, and she knew their dear faces
and their wild-wood names. She loved them with an almost human love.
They were to her companions and friends. She knew their likings and
dislikings, their joys and sorrows,--who among them chose the darkest
nooks of the old woods, and who bloomed only to the brightest
sunlight,--who sent their roots deep down among the mosses by the brook,
and who smiled only on the southern hill-side. Around each she wove a
web of beautiful individuality, and more than one had received from her
a new christening. It is true, that, when she came to study from a
book, she made wry faces over the long, barbarous, Latin names which
completely disguised her favorites, and in her heart deemed a great many
of the definitions quite superfluous; but she had strong faith in her
teacher, and when the technical was laid aside for the real, then,
indeed, "her foot was on her native heath, and her name was MacGregor."