AUGUST. 127 



FAMILIES IN THE GARDEN. 



Prettier than any are still the family parties of 

 goldfinches, fluttering like bright butterflies, splashed 

 with yellow and tipped with crimson, among the deep- 

 blue cornflowers, though when you chance upon a 

 family of swallows, cosily twittering side by side, 

 with ruddy throats and glossy steel-blue backs, as 

 they nestle together upon the hanging branch of a 

 mossy apple tree, you are inclined to bracket them 

 equal first as jewels among British birds. And then 

 you turn and find that all the blue tits, which were 

 lately spider-hunting among the larches, have de- 

 scended to the wild garden, where they cling in 

 mixed acrobatic attitudes to the opium poppy stems, 

 and hammer away at the pods. When a blue tit 

 passes from one ripening poppy pod to another 

 perhaps at the other end of the flower-bed his 

 transit suggests less the flight of a bird than that 

 he had been suddenly " flipped " from one and stuck 

 to the other. But of the pretty ways of birds there 

 is no end. 



THE WHITE POPLAR AND ITS CLIENTS. 



August 1 6. The abele, or white poplar, is one of 

 the loveliest of our trees. It almost rivals the silver 

 birch in the silky whiteness of patches of its stem, con- 

 trasting so cleanly with the dark and rugged wrinkles 

 round them ; and the same tendency to whiteness 

 comes out in the snowy undersides of the leaves, mak- 

 ing the whole tree seem to break into foam with every 

 breeze that touches it. But, unfortunately, the abele 



