A VILLAGE CHRISTMAS 279 



up North, as well as in the South, that the greedy field 

 fares quite failed to arrive, and blackbirds and thrushes 

 all lived on other food. So many are the worms, and 

 so near the surface, that the grass on the Common is as 

 muddy with their casts almost as a tilth. So the sprigs 

 of holly in church and cottage show coral rosettes of 

 rare size and brilliance, its berries, as Tennyson says of 

 the seeds of the dandelion, &quot; all hitting,&quot; or at least all 

 touching. 



In one house in the village is a photograph, received 

 from the West, of a holly in which a good bunch of 

 mistletoe is growing, a rare and most seasonable con 

 junction, though not so rare, perhaps, as the mistletoe 

 that I once saw growing on a standard rose. Round 

 about the French village that I know best grow in long 

 lines, both at the roads edge and in groves about the 

 stream, tall poplars decorated one after the other with 

 bunches of mistletoe solid enough to be taken at a dis 

 tance for the nests of rooks or dreys of squirrels. The 

 country has no hollies, few hedges, and in all respects 

 the French villages and the English are quite diffetent in 

 kind. The French are, perhaps, more like the Irish where 

 the cutting of the boughs from the inexhaustible cruse of 

 the poplar trunks is a village industry comparable with 

 the cutting of peat in Ireland. But poplar, the worst of 

 all woods for the home fire, needs even more drying than 

 peat from the most marshy of hags. Native prejudice 

 gives my suffrage to Huntingdon over the Aisne or Gal- 

 way : but it would be an addition to many villages of my 

 choice if the abundant wood about them were more 

 freely turned to use as well as beauty. The two are not 

 opposed, though a French farmer once said to me on 

 his first visit to England, as he looked at tree and hedge 

 row : &quot; Everything in England is for beauty.&quot; What he 



