80 THE BIRCH AND THE ALDER. 



rich red-brown on the bare pillars of the far-away Scotch firs. On 

 every hand linger pretty relics of the summer, waifs of ivory meadow- 

 sweet, overworn grasses, reluctant to wither, and foxglove bells in twos 

 and threes where once were tall spires of nodding purple ; the scabious 

 and the golden-rod are holding festival ; the ferns have unrolled their 

 last leaflets of braid and spangle ; the heather is fast uncovering its 

 bosom to the bees ; ah, see ! there are berries, too, upon the vitis id(ea > 

 and beautiful round galls, like unripe cherries, upon the oak-leaves; and 

 here, too, is the nipplewort, covered over with little green seed-baskets, 

 and that goes on blossoming so cheerfully till Christmas. A fair and 

 pleasing plant is this ; the blossoms open only to the sunshine, yet it can 

 sustain the rain and cold, and though the frost may blanch it, the form 

 remains to the last. Now we wind along the shady pathway by the 

 river, and list its sweet babble, that never ceases, winter or summer, 

 marking too, as we go, the great stones that tell of the vehemence of the 

 flood that so wasted the banks. Are the birches down here ? I think 

 not ; we are too near the water's edge. Try among those beautiful 

 green crowds upon the upper ridges, that seem asleep in the amber 

 sunlight, with above them that glorious inheritance men call the sky, 

 to-day blue as turquoise or forget-me-not, and islanded with molten 

 silver. Surely we shall have them now ! Ah, yes. Here spread those 

 beautiful white arms ; here sweep the leafy tresses ; let the stream 

 rejoice in its alders ; the birch is for the upland, where it shall receive 

 the first caresses of the morning, and be a brightness again when the 

 stars twinkle, and Endymion is bathed in the light of his love. 



The preference of the birch for a dry and airy situation, combined 

 with the matchless delicacy of its figure, and its perfect penetrability by 

 the light, well adapt it also for the central ornament of a lawn or large 

 grass plot; and . beautiful is it, in the calm of a summer's evening, to 

 watch the bright round moon shine through it undimmed. In old trees 

 the bark is apt to be very much broken up, and there come great 

 patches of corrugated blackness, which serve, however, by the contrast, 

 to make the silver that remains still more conspicuous. In other cases, 

 these tarnished parts become green with the incipient growth of mosses. 

 When covered up from the corroding influences of the atmosphere, the 

 sheen of the bark seems indestructible, as shown, very curiously, when 

 lumps of ancient birch-tree wood are dug out of peat-bogs. In 

 Cheshire it happens frequently that when the peat-diggers penetrate to 

 near the bottom, they come upon boughs and branches, with twigs 

 innumerable, the interior or ligneous portion broken or decayed, but 



