THE OPPORTUNITIES OF THE YEAR 217 



boughs of the trees are instinct still with beauty, 

 even though their yellowing leaves have floated 

 down the stream of Time. Their year's round 

 of duty has been fulfilled, the season for recruiting 

 has come, and it is good. The buds lie dormant, 

 but they are not hidden ; there they are, plainly 

 getting ready to start afresh when the call of the 

 rising sap bids them awake, and, meanwhile, we 

 do not grudge them their well-earned rest. It is 

 beneficent sleep, not death, that we mark in every 

 stately limb and curve of swaying bough and close- 

 packed bud, and we go on our way rejoicing in 

 hope. 



It is in winter that we make fast friends with 

 the trees of the garden, and learn the idiosyncrasy 

 of each the sweep of horse chestnut boughs and 

 their varnished gummy buds ; the knotted branch- 

 lets and rugged boles of the oaks; the drooping 

 spray of birches, where the witches hang their 

 broom-heads, and the white film of their flaking 

 bark; the grey wrinkled stems and black angled 

 buds of the ash ; the red twigs of lime. One never 

 knows a tree until one can call it by its name 

 in undress as well as in its familiar summer uni- 

 form. How much is lost of winter joy and interest 

 when the eye is not trained enough to detect the 

 difference between oak and elm, the silver birch 

 and the birch of the coppice, the beech and the 

 lime, the sycamore and the plane ; nor the ear 

 attuned to catch the notes of robin and wren, the 

 first pipe of blackbird or twitter of hedge sparrow 

 and chaffinch in the dawn of the early year ! 



To some temperaments winter is beyond measure 



