266 OUR COMMON FEFITS. 



X 



glossy Chestnut in smooth shining suit ; we love ye all r 

 and gladly address ourselves to gather up some fragments 

 of your history. 



Eirst and foremost, because commonest and most po- 

 pular, attention is claimed by what are usually called 

 " Nuts " par eminence ; i.e., the various members of the 

 Hazel tribe, rejoicing together in the gentle name of 

 Avelana, or Avelan, which, as Evelyn informs us, was the 

 ancient orthography of his name also, and was originally 

 derived from Avellano, a city of Naples, where this fruit 

 was very largely cultivated. The primitive Northern mind 

 devised a more descriptive name, the word hossil in Anglo- 

 Saxon signifying a head-dress, in allusion to the covering 

 with which all of the family are more or less capped ; such 

 of them as have a short calyx being generally called Nuts, 

 while those with long enveloping husks are termed Eil- 

 berts. To the former class, of course, belong those wild- 

 ings of the wood connected with so many tender remini- 

 scences of youthful years, when the most delightful of all 

 holidays was that which was spent in " going a nutting." 

 Does not the very naming of them recall the setting forth 

 on some joyous autumn morning girls with baskets on 

 their arms, boys with bags slung round their necks ; the 

 preliminary search for fit branches to afford hooked sticks, 

 and the careful cutting and preparing of these by the 

 way ; and then, on arriving at the scene of action, the 

 glad shout of some open-hearted boy on coming first to a 

 well-laden bush, or the cunning silence of the selfish one, 

 who only gathered on all the more quickly in order to 

 secure as many as possible before his comrades arrived to 

 share the spoil. And what perilous stretching was there 

 over deep ditches to reach an opposite hedge ; and what 

 an anxious upward strain after those particularly fine 

 clusters, growing so very high up as to be almost beyond 

 even the hook's attainment ! We little thought, by the 

 way, with what magic might we were trifling when using 

 such a hooked stick merely as a means to get at our nuts 

 more easily; all ignorant how, in other days, it was 

 deemed, " by its spontaneous bending from a horizontal 

 position, to discover not only mines and subterraneous 



