THE HEART OF THE COPSE ng 



made thatching scarcer and less elaborate, so that we seldom 

 see now a row of corn stacks, cris-crossed with a pattern of 

 hazel ties like an open jam tart. Sugar and other groceries 

 are imported in vessels of smaller bulk, so as to save re- 

 packing ; and the bonds for the repacked parcels are wanted 

 no more. Cottagers use coal more, and wood less, and the 

 rural exodus has made skilful copse-cutters scarce, and their 

 labour dear. As the upshot of all these changes, copses are 

 in many places an unprofitable form of culture, and would 

 be turned to other uses if it were not for the great labour 

 and expense of grubbing them up. In the meantime many 

 of them are not cut in the proper season, and are let run 

 wild. It might be thought that a copse which had run wild 

 would be richer in natural life than one which was regularly 

 tended ; but this is not so. Properly managed copses are 

 fuller of wild life than the woods out of which they were 

 formed, and into which they relapse. The regular removal 

 of the young wood when it gets tall and shadowy, makes a 

 copse a perpetual garden of all the flowers, birds, animals, and 

 butterflies which love an open and sunny thicket. Luxuriant 

 in all the late spring and early summer months, such copses 

 are fullest of life in May. 



Bluebells, apple-blossom, and nightingales are the three 

 most beautiful features of the May copses and spinneys, and 

 turn their thick solitudes into an exquisite garden of delight. 

 Beautiful as bluebells and crab-blossom are severally, they 

 intensify each other's beauty when the rosy boughs lean 

 down to the blue carpet beneath them, and the wind sets the 

 petals falling in the May sunshine. The earth seems set 

 free of time and its punctual cares; the random breezes in 

 the boughs mark the passing of the hours at their own will. 

 The scents of both masses of blossom mingle as freshly 

 sweet as their two colours. Through all this exquisite 



