1898.] ESSAYS. 99 



the English boys and girls would do without the thorn and the 

 briar. The hawthorn and the sweet-briar are England's fra- 

 grant and beautiful gifts to the country-folk in all that little land. 

 We hardly find a cottage in all her lanes and byways which 

 has not a bush b}^ its doorway of the sweet-briar. I wonder how 

 many thousands of Englishmen there are scattered about the 

 world, in busy American towns, on Canadian farms and Austra- 

 lian sheep-ranches, and in Indian cotton-fields and African gold- 

 mines, who, if across their pathway were to come the fragrance 

 of the sweet-briar, would be carried back, as a perfume will 

 carry one back, to the scenes of boyhood; loved and cherished 

 scenes of the little cottage and the mother's ways about the 

 house. Then the hawthorn ; — I suppose there was not a boy 

 or girl who did not go Maying, which was, as is meant there 

 still, to go after the white and fragrant blossoms of the May or 

 English hawthorn. And what scratching of hands and tearing 

 of clothes it meant, too ! 



You are more or less familiar with the hawthorn, and have 

 seen great bushes, even trees of the cultivated variety, growing 

 up about our city. It forms those green hedges that separate 

 the fields and farms and roads in the place of fences and add so 

 much beauty to the English landscape. Let me say that the 

 hawthorn hedges almost invariably, in the moist, mild Eng- 

 lish climate, grow a wall of green to the very ground ; its 

 white flowers are the joy of the bees, the butterflies and the 

 children, and its red fruit, or haws as we used to call them, 

 are equally the joy of the birds in the winter-time and the 

 hungry children at all times. Its thorns make it a farmer's 

 hedge which no cattle will try twice to penetrate. 



I can remember no happier experience than when the spring- 

 time came (and in my part of England, down in the South, it 

 is beginning to come already), and the days grew longer, and 

 the air sweet and warm, and the hedge-rows blossomed, going 

 after the May and coming back all scratched and torn, but 

 bearing triumphantly great masses of the fragrant blossoms. I 

 wish I could transport you to an English country-side in an 

 English spring, so fragrant and so musical. It seems to me, — 



