SUGGESTIONS OF A BROOMSTICK. 79 



But leaving private experience, which ever lacks largeness and 

 universality, let us take this crippled stump, worn as it is to a mere 

 shadow in the service of that which is next to godliness. It was once 

 a comely, upright, lusty broom, with a stout birchen body, and a 

 green bushy head ; and though ever standing with its one leg in the 

 air, yet always ready to be useful, and run the risk of apoplexy for the 

 service of a good cause. Its wretched stump, now reduced to the last 

 extremity of vegetable suffering, was, in time gone by, a waving 

 branch of lady-birch, and was clothed in silver bark, and tassellcd 

 over with delicate twigs and little fairy leaves. When spring came, it 

 danced to and fro in the sunlight, and its shadow glided up and down 

 the white ledges of the rocks, over which its pensile sprays peeped to 

 see the water trickle down the ravine. Glorious was the lady-birch 

 at any season ; glorious, too, the hale green broom ; the one gleaming 

 in the morning sun, where the wood-pigeon built her nest, the other 

 dressing the stony moor with yellow livery, and both living to make 

 the world more beautiful. It is this birch * which supplies the best 

 of wood for broomsticks, and whose young feathery branches often take 

 the place of the green broom in the completion of the besom. In the 

 Highlands they use it for tanning, for dyeing wool yellow ; its bark 

 supplies Highland candles and Norway bread ; its wood, charcoal and 

 printers' ink ; its leaves, fodder for horses, kine, sheep, and goats ; and 

 its seed, food for that pretty songster of the wood, the aberdevine. 

 The sap of the birch makes the birch-wine of English housewifery, of 

 which those who know how to make it are not a little proud: — 



And though she boasts no charms divine, 

 Yet she can make and serve birch-wine. 



Warton. 



It will flourish in English woods, and there is not a wood worth 

 rambling in which has not many of these light, fairy- creatures, pen- 

 cilling the sky with their trembling spidery network of leaves and 

 branches. It was this same birch from which the Gauls extracted 

 bitumen, and which the Russians now use to prepare the celebrated 

 Russian leather; which the carpenter finds best of all wood for rafters, 

 ploughs, spades, and carts ; which the Highland peasants use for har- 



* Birch — Celt. Beta; A. S., birc ; Dutch, berke; German, berkan, birch- 

 enbauni; Fr., bouleau; Ital. betulla. Pliny, I. 16, c. 18, speaks of the mirabilis 

 candor ot the birch. " It showeth wonderful white," says Holland. 



