46 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



of merry England. Unproductive in themselves of 

 anything that is good for even the timber they 

 contain is but rarely so they are equally an ob- 

 struction to the plough that toils for bread, and the 

 eye that wanders for beauty. Far be it from the old 

 Chronicler to depreciate the * tangled copse ' or the 

 * boundless contiguity of shade ' that gilds the early 

 remembrance of some, and the imagination of all ; 

 that lives in the tasteful pages of Evelyn and Price, 

 or in the ' charming bits ' of Wilson or Nasmyth : 

 but where can be the pictorial or moral beauty of a 

 great crooked artificial mound surmounted by a dead 

 fence serrated into gaps and * raspers,' or at the best, 

 hogged into dreary uniformity that cuts the blessed 

 landscape from the eye, by a man-made barrier of 

 stakes and l witherings ? ' ' Take away the curtain 

 that I may see the picture ' might any mortal say, 

 who from his first lesson in Geography had learnt 

 that a man six feet high has a sort of physical right 

 to a panoramic horizon of three miles on this round 

 globe of ours, even in a district like mine where not 

 a hill was to be viewed. 



To be sure there is one rather formidable con- 

 sideration the hedge-pheasant-shooting ' beating 

 the outsides ' that pleasant October skirmishing that 

 precedes the coming up of the heavy artillery at 



