282 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
JOLY 17. 
This spot, therefore, should he sacred to us as a shrine, 
and its woodland garlands, its shimmering leaves,its mosses, 
its dowers, speak of a more enduring beauty than anything 
in this world. 
Behind this pile of rocks a thick forest stretches itself 
over the brow of the hill, and as you come near the rough 
fence and look in, it seems hopelessly impenetrable. 
But a merry concerto of birds, and the distant waving of 
some anemones decides you to risk a predestined scratched 
face, and so after a clamber you come crashing down among 
the shrub-oaks and birches on the other side. A brisk twig 
gives you a smart cut over your face, a long armed black¬ 
berry bush tears otf your sun-bonnet, and another lays hold 
of your arm as if it had teeth and claws. But after all, 
the bark of nature is worse than her bite, and after making j 
a few pacific arrangements with your new friends, you push ! 
on and soon discover a broad, cleared path cut through the 
entire wood. Here you are then alone with nature, and 
God the father of it. The ground is now paven and dry 
with ever-falling pine leaves, now fringy with grasses, and 
checkered over with moving flecks and spots of sunshine 
and shadow. Either side the violets, not one alone, but a 
perfect border of them, of that large and beautiful kind 
which botanists call the pedate or birds-foot, and whose 
large flowers and delicately-cut leaf spring in careless 
profuseness from the driest and sandiest of soils. There is 
something quite affecting in the joyous abundance and 
pertinacity with which some very lovely flowers will grow in 
the poorest soils. They are missionaries of God’s love, they 
delight in adorning waste places ; you may transplant them 
to your trim garden, but you can never give them there the 
perfect abandon of beauty with which they will spring up 
out of a dry sand heap. Every moment you stop at some 
cluster of these flowers that seems to you fairer, more 
clearly cut, more finely coloured than the last. Some you : 
admire for their pale and delicate tint, and some for their 
firm and decided colour, and ever and anon you say to your¬ 
self, the sweet jargon of the man William, of 
“ Violets blue, 
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes.” 
Words which have very little real meaning, but a kind of j 
enchantment of suggestion, like a snatch of an old song. i 
Either side of you the shrub-oaks are putting out their , 
first young leaves, and you stop momently to admire. They ■ 
are as exquisite as an infant’s hand, so clearly cut and 
finished in their red velvet richness. There is many a city j 
lady, perhaps, who has never seen a new oak leaf, and would 
think, if she did, that a French milliner had shaped it of j 
crimson velvet. Here now is another oak, whose infant ; 
leaves of a different form and texture are of a delicate pink 
shade, and thin as tissue paper; from a third the tasseled 
blossom is hanging swaying in the wind. You take these 
little new-made leaves, and lay them in your hand with j 
tender reverence; there is an exquisiteness in them, a 
perfection that impresses you with the unvarying power and 
skill that acts from year to year, and every spring re-enacts I 
the resurrection miracle of the former. God giveth it a 
body as it pleaseth him, and to every leaf its own body. 
Of all the multitude of things which at spring time reclotlie 
themselves, not one makes a mistake, or comes out acci¬ 
dentally in the garments of his neighbour. 
We ramble on, and now the ground sinks and becomes 
black and marshy. Here the white violets love to unfold— 
fair they are, streaked with purple on their under lip, and 
sending out a fragrance not unlike their English namesake. 
Here, too, rejoicing in the black, rich mould, rises the green, 
luxuriant Verulrum with its richly plaited leaf, and the plant 
of less fragrant odour, whose name is not for ears polite, 
but which certainly grows with a jubilant rank hilarity, and 
shows a stocky greenness by no means unworthy admiration. 
Vigour and vivacity are admirable even in a skunk's cabbage, 
and one had rather, after all, look at its rank, hearty coarse¬ 
ness, than at a sickly, conservatory nursling, as one prefers 
the honest, rude, genuine nature, to an insipid conven¬ 
tionalist. 
But, lo ! the silverweed, with its tufts of graceful leaves ; 
a child also of moist places, and rejoicing in shade. Silver- 
weed was one of the fairy queens of our childhood, for it 
was our delight to hold a spray beneath the brown rippling 
waters of the brook, and see it change to glittering silver, an 
easy jugglery, at which children never tire of wondering, j 
Silverweed has no blossom now, but in August will shake ! 
her head adorned with tremulous white fringes fit for a j 
fairy court. But there, if our eyes do not deceive us, is a ! 
clump of pink lady-slippers hiding in yonder knot of alders! j 
Some call them Venus’ moccasin, and with their broad j 
folded leaves, their gracefully-bent head, their pink, shell¬ 
like blossoms, they are worthy any court of flowers. Yon¬ 
der old mossy stump has a white crowd of the crows foot 
around it, standing with bowed heads amid their maroon- 
colored-leaves. The flower never seems in good spirits, it is 
rarely open, but stands downcast, with its corolla folded 
together, and the faintest streak of rose-colour on its petals; 
it is a thoughtful and pensive flower, and we have often | 
wondered whether it be identical with the “ tufted crow-toe ” • 
which Milton summons to dec-k the bier of Lycidas : 
11 Call the vales, and hid them hither bring 
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues. 
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use 
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, 
On whose fresh lap the swart star rarely looks, 
Bring hither all your quaint, enamelled eves 
That on the green turf suck the honied showers, 
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. 
Bring the rath primrose, that forsaken dies. 
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jassemine, 
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, 
The glowing violet, the musk rose, 
And the well-attired woodbine.” 
Close beside the crows-foot grows the fairest of spring’s 1 
children, the etherial anemone. The wind flower—flower j 
that seems to float on the breeze, to be a blossom of air j 
more than earth. To us it seems like those tremulous 
shimmering delights, half told, yet inexpressible, that are 
born in our hearts every spring time, and which seem airy 
more than earthly. But hark ! a still small gurgle among 
those heavy green leaves, and lo! the little brown brook, 
with a still tingle, is winding its way among the dense under¬ 
growth. Not prattling, whirling, frisky, like some of his j 
tribe, hut discreet and still; he comes stealing with scarce a | 
murmur, sliding through yonder gap in the old mossy stone 
wall, playing in a thousand quaint little rings and eddies, 
bearing along on his waters the white showering leaves of 
the shadblow and the anemone. Listen! and there is the 
faintest tinkle! You can hear every whirr of the leaves ; 
you seem to hear a patter and a flutter, and yet the sound is 
so small, it is what the Germans call an wa thing. Ah, how 
beautiful it is to be so deeply alone, and what a sacredness 
there is in the still small voices of leaves! If there is 
devotion in the hush of a congregation, in the flutter of the 
great Bible leaves, in the hymn-book’s rustle before the 
psalm in church, there is a deeper devotion in these inner 
shrines of nature, where the voice of the Lord God is heard 
walking among the trees of the garden. Though living in 
a theological neighbourhood, we cannot but think with 
Wordsworth : 
—II. B. S. 
“ One impulse from a vernal wood, 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can.” 
THE VINTAGE AND THE VINTAGERS. 
Let us now proceed to the joyous ingathering of the 
fruits of the earth—the great yearly festival and jubilee of 
the property and the labour of Medoc. October, the “ wine 
month,” is approaching. For weeks, every cloud in the sky 
has been watched—every cold night breeze felt with nervous 
apprehension. Lpon the last bright weeks in summer, the 
savour and the bouquet of the wine depend. Warmed by 
the blaze of an unclouded sun, fanned by the mild breezes 
of the west, and moistened by morning and evening dews, 
the grapes by slow degrees attain their perfect ripeness and 
their culminating point of flavour. Then the vintage imple¬ 
ments begin to be sought out, cleaned, repaired, and scoured 
and sweetened with hot brandy. Coopers work as if their 
lives depended upon their industry ; and all the anomalous 
tribe of lookers-out for chance jobs in town and country pack 
