THE YEAR S PROGRAMME 119 



more distinctly than the weeping willow by Magdalen 

 Bridge at Oxford, and perhaps its fellows by Clare 

 Bridge at Cambridge possess a more general delicacy. 

 It is only less important to see the early willows on Lea, 

 Thames, Cam or Isis, or where you will than to hear 

 the nightingale in a Surrey spinney or Berkshire hedge 

 row. As for gardens, I know no flowering shrub that 

 can excel the spring charm of a certain Salix Vitellina 

 pendula when it first pullulates. It has all the virtues of 

 the Babylonian willow without its melancholy. 



All weeks of the year have their prizes, but nowabouts 

 is the crowded hour. Who would miss the plum blossom 

 that dresses the valley of Evesham or the bluebells that 

 will soon fill every other open wood, and even the bare 

 islands of the West, with their blue mist, or the anemones, 

 or the blackthorn, at last coming out, or the brushy buds 

 of the chestnut and heath, or the songs of any warbler, 

 or the blue eggs of the thrush, or the water buttercup 

 swinging in the stream ? One little angulus terrarum I 

 know where the sweets contracted lie. It is on a com 

 mon. In a clump where the cherry and gorse flower 

 cheek by jowl and the russet leaves of the oak break, the 

 nightingale always sings, and is often in rivalry with the 

 lark, whose dark eggs lie in grassy cups here, there and 

 everywhere. 



7- 



If there is any one day in the year when more things 

 happen than on other days, it is April 17. That is my 

 experience, and for various reasons I have long taken 

 very close notice of the day. It is more than likely that 

 statistics may not support the theory. It is their way not 

 to endorse our beliefs ; and, of course, what is true of 



