THE COVERTS 269 



though far more beautiful, than anything among the 

 charred stumps and snake-fences of a Canadian settle- 

 ment where the belled cattle will go astray in the 

 fenceless wilds, and where a wandering herd of shaggy 

 ponies may make irruptions into the old-fashioned 

 flower-garden. There are glades where the gipsies 

 and caravan vagabonds have their immemorial camping- 

 places, and hamlets with their bulging roofs of ragged 

 thatch, peopled by charcoal-burning aborigines, whose 

 ancestors have cursed the devastations of the Con- 

 queror or rejoiced over the corpse of the ruthless 

 Red King. 



If we change the scene to the North, the beauties 

 only change their character. In Northumberland, 

 where the woods take naturally to the waters and the 

 sheltered valleys, you have the plantations skirted by 

 the beds of gorse, redolent of perfume in early summer, 

 where the small birds make their nests in safety by 

 thousands, and the foxes have their earths in the thick 

 of the rabbit warrens. Or go to the Scotch Highlands, 

 where the birches feathering down to its brink are 

 mirrored in the shallows of the sleeping loch, and the 

 gleaming white stems rise out of thickets of bracken, 

 bramble, and bilberry, of holly, honeysuckle, and wild 

 rose. Or to the genial shores of West Ireland, warmed 

 by the Gulf Stream, where the myrtles through the 

 mildness of the winter are uninjured, and the arbutus 

 flourishes as in Southern Italy, laden with the luscious 

 red berries that tempt the pheasants. And all these 

 coverts are swarming with animal life, for they are as 



