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VILLAGE SKETCHES; No... XIE. 
Hannan Binet. 
Tur Shaw, leading to Hannah Bint’s habitation, is, as I perhaps have 
said before—(for really it is too much to expect one to remember one’s 
own nonsense to the month’s end)—the Shaw is a very pretty mixture of 
wood and coppice ; that is to say, a track of thirty or forty acres covered 
with fine growing timber—ash, and oak, and elm—very regularly 
planted ; and interspersed here and_ there with large patches of under- 
wood, hazel, maple, birch, holly, and hawthorn, woven into almost impe- 
netrable thickets by long wreaths of the bramble, the briary, and the 
briar-rose, or by the pliant and twisting garlands of the wild honey- 
suckle. In other parts, the Shaw is quite clear of its basky undergrowth, 
and clothed only with large beds of feathery fern, or carpets of flowers, 
primroses, orchises, cowslips, ground-ivy, crane’s-bill, cotton-grass, 
solomon’s seal, and forget-me-not, crowded together witha profusion and 
brilliancy of colour, such as I have rarely seen equalled even in a gar- 
den. Here the wild hyacinth really enamels the ground with its fresh 
and lovely purple ; there, 
* On aged roots, with bright green mosses clad, 
Dwells the wood-sorrel, with its bright thin leaves 
Heart-shaped and triply folded, and its root 
Creeping like beaded coral ; whilst around 
Flourish the copse’s pride, anemones, 
With rays like golden studs on ivory laid 
Most delicate ; but touched with purple clouds, 
Fit crown for April’s fair but changeful brow.” 
The variety is much greater than I have enumerated ; for the ground is 
so unequal, now swelling in gentle ascents, now dimpling into dells and 
hollows, and the soil so different in different parts, that the sylvan Flora 
is unusually extensive and complete. 
The season is, however, now too late for this floweriness: and, except 
the tufted woodbines, which have continued in bloom during the whole 
of this lovely autumn, and some lingering garlands of the purple wild- 
veitch, wreathing round the thickets, and uniting with the ruddy leaves 
of the bramble, and the pale jestoons of the briary, there is little to call 
one’s attention from the grander beauties of the trees—the sycamore, its 
broad leaves already spotted—the oak, heavy with acorns—and the deli- 
cate shining rind of the weeping birch, “ the lady of the woods,” thrown 
out in strong relief from a back-ground of holly and hawthorn, each 
studded with coral berries, and backed with old beeches, beginning to 
assume the rich, tawny hue, which makes them perhaps the most 
picturesque of autumnal trees, as the transparent freshness of their young 
foliage is undoubtedly the choicest ornament of the forest in spring. 
A sudden turn round one of these magnificent beeches brings us to 
the boundary of the Shaw, and leaning upon a rude gate, we look over 
an open space of about ten acres of ground, still more varied and 
broken than that which we have passed, and surrounded on all sides by 
thick woodland. As a piece of colour, nothing can be well finer. The ruddy 
glow of the heath-flower, contrasting, on the one hand, with the golden- 4 
blossomed furze—on the other, with a patch of buck-wheat, of which the 
