80 WAYSIDE SHKUBBERY. 



The passers on this by-road formerly wended their 

 way along a footpath, through its various shrubbery; 

 and the children of the village, as they went to school 

 and returned, would often linger here to gather flowers and 

 fruit, sitting down upon some green tussock, under the 

 shady protection of half-grown trees, which had come up 

 without planting. They watched the viburnum, with its 

 circular cymes of white flowers, succeeded by blue, white, 

 and purple berries ; the wild roses that clustered there 

 in June, and the glycine that festooned the thickets with 

 dark flowers in August. They admired the charming 

 negligence of these growths, some with upright stems 

 supporting the twining convolvulus, interwoven with the 

 dark-blue flowers of the woody nightshade, and others 

 climbing overhead and forming an arbor for a summer 

 noonday. The surveyor and his gang have spoiled the 

 footpath, and destroyed the bushes with their flowers and 

 fruit ; and children no less than birds lament this destruc- 

 tion of their pleasant wayside haunts. Ever since my 

 boyhood have these vandals of the roads been deservedly 

 cursed as the despoilers of nature, and the clumsy agents 

 of tasteful imposture. 



There is another class of despoilers who pursue their 

 operations as private citizens. They are generally " model 

 farmers," men who think that nature should be made 

 subservient to labor, and labor to capital. If you stroll 

 along by the estates of these industrious vandals, you 

 will be struck with the baldness and nakedness of 

 the borders of their fields. Not a shrub nor a vine can 

 with impunity lift its head above the ground on either 

 side of their fences, and a squirrel that should venture 

 near them would be hunted like an adder. We may 

 distinguish the possessions of these model farmers by 

 observing, as we pass by, their singular blankness, such 

 as you observe in the face of an overfed idiot. Their 



