"The district officers," which is responded to by one of them who happens to be present. The secretary now reads aloud the names of certain members, who he says will be out of limits if not paid for to-night. This, you will recollect, is required by general law, so that any member present may pay to keep another "good upon the books." The neglect of the secretary to do this, or to send notice to a member owing so much, does not screen any member from the consequence of non-payment. If one suffers his arrears to exceed fourteen weeks-if only by a penny-he is out of limits, and must wait another fourteen weeks after paying up before he can receive sick allowance, or his relatives funeral money. Fining the secretary for his neglect would afford no relief to the member, but possibly gratify some others more fond of sticking to the letter of the law than anxious to learn the spirit. Should the lodge attempt to pay the sick allowance or funeral claim in such a case, any member could appeal to the district committee to rescind any resolution for such a purpose; and should that committee, from mistaken motives of benevolence, still confirm it, he would again appeal to the G.M. and Board of Directors, who would undoubtedly revoke it as being illegal. The chairman of the lodge, or district, permitting such a resolution to be put to the vote, would also be fined. Remember that lodge funds are the joint property of the district, and district funds the joint property of the Unity, and can only be dealt with strictly according to law. Here you see the necessity for knowing the laws, and for every member always to act up to them. Whilst giving this explanation, the chairman has had the names of proposed candidates read, and we are now to be upstanding whilst he declares the lodge closed. One of our members enters hurriedly, and we learn he is off into another part of England, and asks for his clearance. The chairman is obliged to tell him the matter cannot be entertained, because no business can be legally done after halfpast ten, but it will be considered next lodge-night, and the clearance forwarded to him, provided he has paid in enough cash to clear up to the day it will bear date; however, we drink health and prosperity to him in his new undertaking, and bid him a hearty farewell. Attending your lodge regularly, you will on other nights learn the various business to be done. Next week a member may come from the country, bringing his clearance, and asks your lodge to accept him. He is told to get your surgeon's certificate, and he will then be entered as your member. The lodge he has left is liable to his sick allowance and funeral money, should he be ill or die within the succeeding twelve months; after that he takes the benefits of, and from, your lodge and district. At stated periods delegates are elected to district committees, and Widows' and Orphans' Fund meetings. Quarterly, the auditors are chosen, and officers changed, for conducting the business of your lodge, and the lodge lectures and degrees are given. Quarterly also a report is received from the G.M. and Board, containing an account of their proceedings, and of what is passing in the Unity, which must be read in the lodge, and the new pass-word, and the Odd-fellows' Magazine. You will find lodges are in correspondence with each other, with regard to paying benefits to members. One of your lodge may be in some distant town, one of another lodge may be living close to yours, and if either falls sick, he applies to the nearest lodge, which, under certain rules that must always be observed, pays the proper allowance, and a settlement is periodically come to between the lodges. On another night some member may propose an alteration in the laws, and if they are the bye-laws of your own lodge, a summoned meeting of your members is called to consider the proposition made. It would be unfair if members not generally present should find, on their next attendance, that some important change in the laws had been made without previous notice to them. Now, however positive you may be about the necessity of some change in the laws, be careful not to move for a special summoned meeting; wait till the ordinary summoned meeting of the lodge, which, under good and proper management, ought not to be oftener than once a year. Lodges generally have brought upon the Unity much well deserved censure, for the foolish extravagance of quarterly summoned meetings, which swell up, most unnecessarily, the expenses of management-a favourite theme for our enemies, and upon which they never fail to enlarge, sometimes most unfairly. A better practice is now obtaining in the majority of lodges; they summon only for the first lodge night in the year, and if necessary, resolve to adjourn from quarter to quarter, "to transact any business required to be done by a summoned meeting, except the alteration of lodge laws;" this, you see, saves printing summonses, and members the expense of postage, which they may apply, if they please, to secure extended benefits; and no harm results from this sensible way of doing business. The officers chosen do the necessary business of the lodge at every meeting-all swims along smoothly-and the officers are no longer dummies set up to be looked at on each ordinary night, or puppets to be put in motion, or perhaps insulted, at each quarterly grumbling committee, held according to antiquated, and almost obsolete, custom. The lodge is greatly benefited by the vigilance and care of its members, who attend more frequently than under the old system; and a greater check is put upon possible frauds by officers, which have unfortunately been too often committed by secretaries, who, possessing a peculiar suavity of manner, advise a jog-trot way of proceeding, so that knowing they will not be disturbed for a certain period prepare to deceive auditors, and prepare themselves to decamp when discovery cannot be avoided. One other important matter I should tell you, which is, that in lodges originate alterations of district or general laws. Your lodge, in adopting an alteration, simply approves a principle, and it rests with the district committee, or the A.M.C., to pass or reject the alteration; it is not necessary to propose any such alteration at a summoned committee of your lodge, any ordinary regular meeting will do. You ask me now to explain the meaning of the different colours of sashes, caps, and aprons, which are worn by those in the lodges. Let me remind you that the general laws are plain on the subject; but we will talk as we go home. You are, or may in time be, entitled to wear 66 as Past Sec., ditto. Pink as V.G., or Vice-Grand, (Vice-Chairman). Scarlet as N.G., or Noble Grand, (Chairman). 46 as P.G., or Past Grand, (Past Chairman). Purple as Prov. C.S., or Provincial Corresponding Secretary. 16 as P.P. G.M., or Past Prov. Grand Master. 66 as C.S., or Corresponding Secretary of the Order. as D.G.M., or Deputy Grand Master of the Order. as G.M., or Grand Master ditto. You ask if you shall ever attain those offices. That depends upon yourself, The way is open to you, and to all others; but to reach the highest honour (G.M.) you will have to prove yourself worthy of it by a long course of labour. You shall be put in training for it, in this way :-next lodge night, the 29th March, 1859, I will propose you as secretary; and if the lodge elects you, you will serve that office for three months ending June, and will then be eligible for V.G. Should you take warden or other inferior office, you must serve six months, or twenty-six nights, instead ; but the secretary's office counts for double service. We will next suppose you elected V.G. -you serve another three months to September, and seek to be N.G. Now, here our "secrets" interfere; you will be asked if you have taken your four degrees, in which you must be perfect or you cannot be elected. You have only taken one-the white-and we must get the lodge to give you certificates to obtain the others-blue, scarlet, and gold, from other lodges. If your lodge refuses, you can appeal to the district; the spirit of the law is that at least one month shall elapse between the taking of each degree, and though our lodge only holds lectures quarterly it has no right to prevent your obtaining them elsewhere. You take them, and become N.G., the most important office in your lodge, and work for three months, until December. You then, as a matter of course, become G.M., till March, 1860; and, having served that office meritoriously, your name is inscribed on the respect-board. You will now go to the quarterly district lectures (April) to receive the signs and pass-words appertaining to the various offices you have filled up to N.G., and, three months after, the Purple Degree. In the meantime we will suppose you have been selected as delegate to the committee of your district, held in June, when you may be proposed as Prov. D.G.M., if your services and abilities have brought you into favourable notice. At the next committee, in December, you are not elected, votes being against you; but as delegates are wanted to the 1861 A.M.C., or Annual Moveable Committee, the Odd-fellows' grand parliament, you are chosen as one. Some kind friend may also propose that you be nominated by the district for D.G.M., if so, your name is circulated throughout the Unity in the next April Quarterly Report. Presuming you may be fortunate enough to be chosen, on Whit-Monday, 1861, to that important office, it is possible that next year you might be G.M., and after Whit-Monday, 1863, would be called P.G.M. As you become better acquainted with the practice of the Order, you will find the supposition I have made is too good to be true-in fact, such rapid advancement is hardly likely-but, you see that at least there is a good previous assurance you are fitted for high office before you are elected, because you must have served well for a year in your lodge, and be afterwards zealous in the business of Odd-fellowship. With other members it may be different; your lodge meets weekly, and in those which do so fortnightly or monthly one would be two or four years before being in your position. Fifty-two nights' active service is wanted before you are P.G.; it might happen then that your district would elect you Prov. D.G.M., or that, at the first A.M.C., you would be chosen one of the Board of Directors. Enough for the present. We must converse again before I can finish my guide. A DAY WITH THE ELDER HERBALISTS. BY CAROLINE A. WHITE. "But Hampstead pleads himself in simples to have skill, Polyalbion. WHEN the Lazers sat in the sun, and clapped their almsbowls before the gate of St. Giles's-in-the-Fields, in order to give notice of their presence, and enable the charitable passers-by, to fling them an oblation without approaching them; when Gray's-Inn-Lane was shady with green trees, and St. Pancras Church shone out amongst fair meadows, and the road thence to the village of Cantle-ows, or Kentish Town, lay between blossoming hedge rows, with the water of the Old Fleet river fresh from the Hampstead fields, flowing between black alders, and tall bundles of purple loosestrife, and beds of water flags; now idling along in sandy shallows, now rippling in brisk eddies over stone-impeded falls; the walk from Holborn through Hampstead Wood, the way to which lay through a gate opening out of the said village of Kentish Town into it, and thence over its wooded slopes and valley to the heath; must have made a fitting prelude to a day's simpling there, especially to men like our elder herbalists, in whom the organs of veneration and wonder were strong, and who never, it seems to me, omitted the idea of the Creator from conjunction with His works ; but, faint as were their knowledge of floral beauty, and of the wonders involved in the physiology of plants, (since the microscope had still to be invented), recognised His hand and worshipped it, while gathering those "herbs of grace,"-to them so many signatures of hidden healing. The hygeists, who visited the heath in Michael Drayton's times, did so by paths almost as rustical as those the Elizabethan botanists had trodden. And by the quaint lines with which I have headed this chapter, it is evident that the heath had then lost nothing of its fame, as the local habitat of many of the plants figured in the Great Herbal, by the "father of English Botany," John Gerard. It still helped to make Bucklersbury sweet in "simpling time," and was resorted to at the advent of Rogation week, at least, till the days of the Puritans, for milkwort (the Flos Ambervalia of Dodanaus), to make nosegays and chaplets for the children, who, headed by the clergymen, were wont to walk the bounds of their respective parishes, chaunting hymns and repeating prayers, unconscious representatives of the youths and maidens in the processions of the old Roman Ambervalia-the Christian priests replacing the Fratres arcales, and, alas! giving place to the parish beadle in later times, when the circuit of the fields, to offer prayers and thanksgiving for the prospective hope of the earth's increase, seemed too simple a service to be continued! But Nature's services have not changed-her pageants, season by season, produce the same fair floral groups, and the dews of the year of grace, crowned with cometary glory which has just passed by, have fallen on the scions of the same families, phytologically speaking, which had their place on Hampstead Heath when Elizabeth was Queen. If we collate the catalogue of them with those that bloom there now, we shall find that, with the exception of the lily of the valley, and the orchids, and ophrys, long since uprooted or trodden down, scarcely one is missing. Now, as then, the pretty vari-coloured milkwort (polygala vulgaris) enamels the sun-shorn turf with its lowly blossoms, pink, white, or blue; and the upright mouse ear, hawk weed (hieraicum pilosella) creeps softly through the low growing pasture, and lifts its simple stemmed, bright lemon-coloured flowers, almost as thickly as when Parkinson wrote, that one could scarcely set a foot but on the head of it. When, therefore, John Gerard made his summer simpling journeys to the heath, along the paths we have described, and quitting the shade of oak and beech within the wood, came out upon the little valley dividing Highgate and Hampstead hills, at the bottom of which lay the linked ponds, like a chain of quicksilver, reflecting, as they do to-day, the aerial cloudscape, and the grouped trees above their banks, he found the blue spikes of the common bugle (ajuga reptans) piercing the green-sward in the moister places, and because it was good for the cure of aphialtes or the mare, and for the dispersion of those fearful and troublesome fancies, strange sights, and voices in the night to which great drinkers in those times, as in our own, were subject, carefully made a memorandum of its whereabouts. The sun shines upon groups of slender broom branches, fluttering their fairly gilt large yellow flowers in his path, and he treads, as you or I might do, any day through the solstitial season, on little purple mounds of aromatically scented thyme (tamus serpyllum), which contrasts prettily with the bright round corollas of the trailing tormentil (T. officinalis), glittering in the grass beside the tiny flowers of ceronica serpyllifolium, or Paul's Betony. Ever, ever, as the herbalist walked on, the list of the heath's floral treasures lengthened: he notes them all, describes their forms and colours with a minuteness of description quaintly picturesque, but curiously laboured, for the language in which science writes was unknown to him, and for want of it he crowds sentences to express characteristics which are technically told in a few phrases. Yet we must remember that so little was known of Botany as a science in those days, and for long after, that the "Great Herbal" of our pilgrim, who was even then in search of materials for its compilation, remained the standard book of English botanists, till the middle of the seventeenth century. Rising the hill, on the summit of which the mile-wide heath extends, John Gerard would as naturally and reverently pause there as ourselves, and inspire, with a corresponding delight to our own, the beauty of the surrounding prospect. The distant view of the metropolis,-far more distant than at present, and with salient points wholly unlike those that meet us now: the hills of Kent, Essex, and Surrey, as they still appear, with the hanging woods on the declivities of Highgate, and masses of forest ground intercepting the view of far off hamlets, fields, and meadows. Beneath him stretched the heath, with its picturesque groups of alders and other trees; its breadths of gravelly barrenness; its boggy places; the ponds below, into which the winter watercourses drained themselves; the broken ground covered with purple ling, and overspread at the twice yearly seasons of its flowering, with golden fleeces of the yellow furze. Here, lured by its odour, he turns aside to seek the mysterious dodder (cuscuta epithymum), which he remembers Parkinson had found, winding and lacing its red strings about furze and sundry other plants upon the heath, "so as to take away all comfort, as one would think, of the sun from them, and ready to choke and strangle them." And under just such circumstances we find it now, a tangle of red thread inextricably involving the plant it grows upon, and pearled all over with little knots of wax-like, flesh-co |