A STUDY OF YOUNG LIMES. 243 
full glory. We may call this Tree, then, the har- 
binger of summer, as it offers one example of the 
earliest fulfilment of the promise of spring. But 
it is not of the perfect Lime that we would now 
speak—the full-grown Tree, with its head of 
glorious foliage, a quivering mass of clustering 
green, asserting a proud right to take rank 
amongst the finest of its forest companions. 
Our thoughts, indeed, are not now of the wood- 
land Lime at all, for we have before us, as we 
write, twelve young trees of Tilia europea in a 
London garden, and it is these which have sug- 
gested the subject of this chapter. They stand in 
a line fronting us. Between our seat and the 
path which they fringe stretches an expanse of 
level turf, from out of which peep, here and there, 
the white and gold of daisy heads—for these tiny 
floral crowns are rarely absent from greensward 
(into the midst of which they often come mys- 
teriously) even when the latter is growing in 
the heart of smoky towns. Away, to our left, 
continuing the row of our Limes, a laburnum, 
crowded with a wealth of golden chains, bends 
modestly, but gracefully forwards. At the other 
P 
