230 



JULY. 



blue milkwort, the yellow asphodel, and that 

 curious plant, the sundew, with its drops of in- 

 exhaustible liquor sparkling in the fiercest sun 

 like diamonds. There wave the cotton-rush, 

 the tall fox-glove, and the taller golden mul- 

 lein; there grows the classical grass of Par- 

 nassus, the elegant favourite of every poet ; 

 there creep the various species of heathberries, 

 cranberries, bilberries, etc. furnishing the poor 

 with a source of profit, and the rich of simple 

 luxury. What a pleasure it is to throw our- 

 selves down beneath the verdant screen of the 

 beautiful fern, or in the shade of a venerable 

 oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer 

 sound of bees, grasshoppers and ten thousand 

 other insects, mingled with the more remote 

 and solitary cry of the peewit and curlew ! 

 Then to think of the coach-horse urged on his 

 sultry stage, and the plough-boy and his team 

 plunging in the depths of a burning fallow, or 

 of our ancestors, in times of national famine, 

 plucking up the wild fern roots * for bread, and 

 what an enhancement of our own luxurious ease ! 



* It is perhaps not known to every juvenile lover of 

 nature, that a transverse section of a fern-root presents a 

 miniature picture of an oak tree. 



