A USE FOR THE PARTRIDGE 245 



The nut sprays are unusually rich this year in fruit, 

 lately conspicuous by reason of their livelier green, 

 already turning the bright red that comes just before 

 the real nut-brown. Their topmost branches are 

 wreathed in the fluffy festoons of traveller's-joy ; 

 beneath them ramble blackberry briers whelmed in 

 fruit slowly beginning to ripen. There is surely no 

 bearer of edible fruit more constantly prolific than 

 the blackberry. It furnishes an income to hundreds 

 of cottagers whose families, when the partridges have 

 been shot, will roam these fields with baskets, to be 

 poured into puncheons, to be packed into truck-loads 

 for distant town consumption. More beautiful but 

 less useful, the bines of the red bryony are studded 

 with berries in pleasing alternation of green, lemon, 

 and scarlet. The hips are turning, though the last 

 white rose has not fallen ; elder-berries are passing 

 to their ultimate black ; haws coming out of their 

 green before scarcely a leaf has wilted ; sloes turning 

 well-bloomed purple ; and the ultra-scarlet berries of 

 the cuckoo-pint offering their dish of poison to any 

 simpleton it may concern. 



A wounded bird leads us to the wood in which the 

 most brilliant fruit just now is undoubtedly that of 

 the wayfaring tree. These stiff clusters of flat berries 

 ripen black and soon fall off. But now they are on 

 one side almost white and on the other brilliant red. 

 Each cluster of what was in June white blossom, that 

 shone in the dark like an illumination, is now brighter 

 than a flame. As we look down on the whole wood 

 from the hedge at the top, every warfaring tree or 

 mealy guelder is patent at a single glance, and the 

 most hardened sportsman rejoices that the pursuit 



