WAY-SIDE HINTS. 131 



the way-side still show, every succeeding spring, 

 that wondrous wealth of white hawthorn bloom 

 which is so associated in the thoughts of all with 

 English rural landscape. Not always trim, it is true, 

 are the hawthorn hedges ; not without an occasional 

 interlacing of rampant brambles ; not without some 

 stray sapling of other growth cropping out, and 

 lording it over the line of hedge ; but gnarled, stiff, 

 strong, waving with the undulations of the hills, 

 twining with the curves of the road-way unbroken, 

 save by here and there a stile or a cumbrous farm- 

 gate with a fine spray of interlacing branchlets from 

 ground to top white, and noisy with bees in all the 

 season of bloom green, and wavy, and flowing in 

 the flush of the summer's growth carrying their red 

 haws through all the early winter, and when the light 

 snows (as they do, rare times) veil the ground, show- 

 ing their creeping lines of brown up the hills, and 

 athwart the hills, and in soldierly array flanking every 

 country by-road. 



When I think of those long billows of green skirt- 

 ing the paths, and look upon my prosaic posts and 

 rails, it seems to me plain enough that a great bit of 

 the warp upon which have been woven so many of 

 the charming rural pictures in British art and song, 

 is forever wanting to us here. Fancy a trim line of 

 posts running across the clayey ground of one of 



