DEAD LOW 293 



laurel or daphne, first cousin of daphne mezereon, 

 the last bush of which seems to have been removed 

 from the wood to serve in a cottage garden the 

 office of proclaiming spring as soon as Christmas 

 has gone. Daphne laureola blossoms even earlier 

 than D. mezereon, but it does not cover naked 

 branches with a solid crust of purple blossom as 

 the more popular species does. We can find its 

 blossoms now by turning up the crown of leaves, 

 beneath which they hang outwards down the 

 trunk like the blossoms of the crown imperial. 

 They are in delicate honey-green, long in the 

 tube as though designed for bees, and opening only 

 at the extreme end into tiny yellow stars. No 

 bee ever sucks them, and yet the plant sets every 

 year a fair number of oval berries that are purple 

 and poisonous when ripe. 



The hellebore, too, is a poisonous plant, though 

 evidently not to a hungry rabbit. In many 

 places where there should be a tower of fresh 

 green above the saw-edged leaves of last year, 

 there is a little heap of chaff where a rabbit has 

 sat and helped himself to the more digestible 

 portions. 



Rabbits are not in evidence just now except by 

 their works, but there are other shapes running 

 through the brambles and making a noise among 

 the dead leaves. These are blackbirds, most in- 

 dustrious diggers in anything soft now that the 

 frost has bound the meadows. There is no other 

 bird that thus deliberately turns over the earth 



