128 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



XXII. 

 DOG-ROSE AND BRAMBLES. 



IT always seems as though summer had positively come 

 in earnest when one pulls the first scented dog-rose of 

 the season by the wayside. And here at last on the 

 footpath through the Vicarage grounds, hedged in on 

 either hand by clambering brambles and sweetbriar, the 

 wild roses of every sort are really all in full bloom after 

 a very summer-like fashion. It is a quaint and pretty 

 old English trick of language that assigns the less useful 

 or beautiful kinds of each rudely grouped family to the 

 lower animals. The violets without a perfume are dog- 

 violets ; the chestnut that we cannot eat is horse- 

 chestnut ; the common parsnip of the fields is cow- 

 parsnip. It is the same with cat-mint, dog's-mercury, 

 horse-radish, toad-flax, and swine's-cress ; while buck- 

 wheat and buck-beans point back to an older state of 

 things, when deer were far more familiar beasts than now 

 in English woodlands. Fool's-parsley puts the same 

 idea in a more practical and literal light. But who can 

 first have called so beautiful a flower as this blushing 

 pink blossom I am holding in my hand by such a name 

 as dog-rose ? Dogs, I know experimentally, care nothing 

 for the scent of flowers ; and the dog-rose is the sweetest 



