AMONG THE NUTS. ITy 
how to use herbs, as wood-sage or wood-betony. Most 
of the gardens have a few plants of the milky-vcined 
holy thistle—good, they say, against inflammations, and 
in which they have much faith. Soon after the May 
garlands the meadow orchis comes up, which is called 
‘dead men’s hands, and after that the ‘ram’s-horn’ 
orchis, which has a twisted petal; and in the evening 
the bat, which they call flittermouse, appears again. 
The light is never the same on a landscape’ many 
minutes together, as all know who have tried, ever so 
crudely, to fix the fleeting expression of the earth with 
pencil. It is ever changing, and in the same way as you 
walk by the hedges day by day there is always some 
fresh circumstance of nature, the interest of which in a 
measure blots out the past. This morning we found a 
bramble leaf, something about which has for the moment 
put the record of months aside. This bramble leaf was 
marked with a grey streak, which coiled and turned and 
ran along beside the midrib, forming a sort of thoughtless 
design, a design without an idea. The Greek fret seems 
to our eyes in its regularity and its repetition to have a 
human thought in it. The coils and turns upon this 
leaf, like many other markings of nature, form a design- 
less design, the idea of which is not traceable back to a 
mind. They are the work of a leaf-boring larva which 
has eaten its way between the two skins of the leaf, 
much like boring a tunnel betwecn the two surfaces of 
a sheet of paper. If you take a needle you can insert 
the point in the burrow and pass it along wherever the 
bore is straight, so that the needle lies between the two 
sides of the leaf. Off-hand, if any one were asked if it 
were possible to split a leaf, he would say no. This little 
creature, however, has worked along inside it, and lived 
there. The upper surface of the leaf is a darker green, 
1Z 
