XXII. 



DOG-ROSE AND BRAMBLES. 



IT always seems as though summer had positively come 

 in earnest when one pulls the first scented dog-rose of 

 the season by the wayside. And here at last on the foot- 

 path through the Vicarage grounds, hedged in on either 

 hand by clambering brambles and sweetbrier, the wild 

 roses of every sort are really all in full bloom after a very 

 summer-like fashion. It is a quaint and pretty old Eng- 

 lish trick of language that assigns the less useful or beau- 

 tiful kinds of each rudely grouped family to the lower 

 animals. The violets without a perfume are dog-vio- 

 lets ; the chestnut that we cannot eat is horse-chestnut ; 

 the common parsnip of the fields is cow-parsnip. It is 

 the same with cat-mint, dog's-mercury, horseradish, 

 toad-flax, and swine's-cress ; while buckwheat and buck- 

 beans point back to an older state of things, when 

 deer were far more familiar beasts than now in English 

 woodlands. Fool's-parsley puts the same idea in a more 

 practical and literal light. But who can first have called 

 so beautiful a flower as this blushing pink blossom I am 

 holding in my hand by such a name as dog-rose ? Dogs, 

 I know experimentally, care nothing for the scent of 

 flowers ; and the dog-rose is the sweetest in scent of all 

 our English wild roses. Was it merely by way of dis- 

 tinction from the garden rose that it got its name, or was 

 it to mark it off from the rarer sweetbrier, whose leaves 

 are protectively dotted with little rnsty-colored glands, 

 which give out a delicious aromatic perfume when rub- 



