THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FAEM. 311 



fences to be grown up with grass, the consequence 

 being, that during half-a-dozen years I have scarcely 

 seen any improvement in height, besides that, many of 

 the plants have died out at the base. In SulBfolk, some 

 years since, I knew a shrewd farmer plant young oaks 

 in the fence banks at intervals of fifty to a hundred 

 yards. They come in very handily for hurdle heads 

 and stakes of general service, without doing damage to 

 the adjoining crops as an elm would do. Their idio- 

 S5mcrasy is different. Whereas the oak goes deeply 

 down, doing its best early in life to get a substantial 

 hold, and justify its solid character as the tree of Old 

 England, the elm idly spreads its roots abroad, greedily 

 finger-like picking out and pocketing what's nice in the 

 soil, as a child the comfits on a seed-cake. 



Of this variety of disposition you may observe abun- 

 dant illustration on any shelving bank in a woodland 

 district where the frost has undermined and caused to 

 break away the enclosing soil from about the root- 

 mass. There is always something on the face of nature 

 to amuse and instruct. Whose life so enjoyable as the 

 Naturalist's ? He that hath eyes to see, let him see. 



But sweetest of all studies — even though one be not 

 in the technical sense of the word a Naturalist — is the 

 face of nature, as I am sure any one would have said 

 who could have been out with me at four this morning, 

 amidst the fragrant freshness of the fields and woods. 

 Having received a summons to sign, seal, and deliver 

 our volume at earliest convenience, I fixed the exe- 

 cution for to-day, and slept uneasily, I confess, upon the 

 thought : for is it not as though one were parting with 

 a long-accustomed friend, whose company one must 

 henceforth forego ? Exactly at three the concert of the 



