12 THE FLOWERS

that part of it especially which refers to the
habits and formation of the vegetable world.
I made a collection of all the plants in the
neighbourhood, and would walk leagues for
the chance of obtaining a new specimen. I
had other pursuits of the same kind which
filled up the intervals of my professional
duties, and through the Divine goodness,
kept me from worse things during those
years of my life in which I certainly had not
that sense of religion which would have up-
held me in situations of stronger excite-
ment. Thus I was carried on in a com-
paratively blameless course, through a long
period of my life, for which I humbly thank
my God, and take no manner of credit to
myself; though I feel that it is a mercy for
which-an individual cannot be too grateful,
when he is brought to a sense of sin and to a
knowledge of his own weakness, to find that
in the days of his spiritual darkness he has
been guarded, on the right hand and on the
left, from shoals, and rocks, and whirlpools
in which wiser persons than himself have
made terrible shipwrecks. But as I said
above, I was led on from year to year in a
sort of harmless course; and whereas I en-