BY BANK AND COPSE. 17 



beauties of wild Nature this morning. The garden flowers 

 of spring are too precious, or too beautiful as they grow, 

 for us to gather them, and their owner moreover is absent. 

 He has much to engage his attention just at present. 

 Passing through his plough land, where perchance there 

 is already the first gleaming shimmer of young wheat in 

 the fitful sunlight, we may find him sowing oats, or, 

 mindful of the adage 



" David and Chad, 

 Sow peas, good or bad : 

 If they 're not in by Benedick, 

 They had better stop in the rick," 



hastening, whatever the weather, to get both peas and 

 beans into the ground between the first two days and the 

 twenty-first of the month. He may be rolling his grass, 

 planting a few willow cuttings as a fence round his pond, 

 or setting quick along some new hedge-row. 



We have not far to go along this lane before we come to 

 a wild plant in flower. True, it is but a weed, its blossoms 

 are of the smallest, they are white, and you may find them 

 almost anywhere during nine months out of the twelve, yet 

 it is not without interest. It is the little "shepherd's-purse," 

 as it is called in most European languages, the "pick- 

 purse," " pick-pocket," " mother's heart," or, more tragically, 

 "pick your mother's heart out," of some of our country 

 children. Here it is growing under a wall in the dust of 

 the footpath, its tuft of jagged root-leaves already be- 

 smirched with the first dust of the year. Some of the 

 little cruciform flowers are already over, and, as the main 

 flower-stalk has lengthened, carrying up its close, flat 

 terminal cluster of buds, these first flowers are represented 

 by the heart-shaped pods to which the plant owes most of 



