3io FROM A MIDDLESEX GARDEN 



The late leaves float 'hove home of perch and pike, 



The berries shimmer 'bove the banks enmossed. 

 How ruinous this touch so fairy-like ! 

 How brief the frost ! " 



Here in Summer, when the whispering trees, leaf-ladened, 

 waved gracefully, and their boughs tossed high in the air, 

 like huge green waves of some sea, the beauty and symmetry 

 of trunk and branches were lost to view ; but now, as we 

 walk in the empty woodlands, these become visible, and to 

 the cultivated mind an added beauty to the Winter landscape. 

 In the seeming silence of the Winter sleep, which seems to 

 wrap everything, Nature is still at work, for she is never idle, 

 knowing not ennui. Along every path is seen the ruin of 

 Summer and Autumn's beauty, the brown, curled, faded 

 bracken under foot, and overhead the few withered leaves 

 still clinging to the branches of the pollards. 



The sparrows keep up a continual chirp among the ivy 

 that swathes the old wall bordering the garden ; the blackbird 

 and thrush grow more friendly towards us. How few are 

 the flowers. Upon the branches of the arbutus (the straw- 

 berry or austere tree) hang the ripened berries formed by last 

 year's blossoms. A pretty contrast is this to many another 

 evergreen, such as Araucaria imbricata, or monkey puzzle, 

 cypress, and Arbor vit<e. Neither is any well-cared-for garden 

 complete without its clump of Christmas roses, those ever- 

 welcome pale blossom stars that blush above the snow, re- 

 deeming the garden from its look of utter desolation. There 

 is one other flower which is very dear to the December garden, 

 Jasmine nudiflorum naked flowering jasmine ; it is one of 

 the most desirable of hardy deciduous climbers, producing 

 a great abundance of flowers, like clusters of golden stars, 



