"EARTH "-STOPPING. 67 



in themselves of any thing that is good for even 

 the timber they contain is very rarely so they 

 are equally an obstruction to the plough that toils 

 for bread, and the eye that wanders for beauty. 

 Far be it from the old Chronicler to depreciate the 

 "tangled copse," or the "boundless contiguity of 

 shade" that gilds the early remembrance of some, 

 and the imagination of all ; that lives in the tasteful 

 pages of Evelyn and Price, or in the "charming 

 bits " of Wilson or ISTasmyth : but where can be 

 the pictorial or moral beauty of a great, crooked, 

 artificial mound surmounted by a dead fence ser- 

 rated into gaps and " raspers," or at the best, hogged 

 into dreary uniformity that cuts the blessed land- 

 scape from the eye, by a man-made barrier of 

 stakes and " witherings." "Take way the curtain 

 that I may see the picture " might any mortal say, 

 who, from his first lessons in Geography had learnt 

 that a man six feet high has a sort of physical 

 right to a panoramic horizon of three miles on 

 this round globe of ours, even in a district like 

 mine, where not a hill was to be viewed. 



To be sure there is one rather formidable con- 

 sideration the hedge-pheasant-shooting " beating 

 the outsides" that pleasant October skirmishing 

 that precedes the coming up of the heavy artillery 



