he shakes the tree with a mighty swing that brings down a pelting shower of stony bergamots, which the father gathers rapidly up, whilst the mother can hardly assist for her motherly fear-a fear which only spurs the spirited boy to bolder ventures. Is not that a pretty picture?

Ah! here is the hedge along which the periwinkle wreathes and twines so profusely, with its evergreen leaves shining like the myrtle, and its starry blue flowers. It is seldom found wild in this part of England; but, when we do meet with it, it is so abundant and so welcome,—the very robinredbreast of flowers, a winter friend. Except in those unfrequent frosts which destroy all vegetation, it blossoms from September to June, surviving the last lingering crane's-bill, forerunning the earliest primrose, hardier even than the mountain-daisy,-peeping out from beneath the snow, looking at itself in the ice, smiling through the tempests of life, and yet welcoming and enjoying the sunbeams. Oh, to be like that flower!

The little spring that has been bubbling under the hedge all along the hillside begins, now that we have mounted the eminence and are imperceptibly descending, to deviate into a capricious variety of clear deep pools and channels, so narrow and so choked with weeds that a child might step across them. The hedge has also changed its character. It is no longer the close compact vegetable wall of hawthorn, and maple, and brier-roses, intertwined with bramble and woodbine, and crowned with large elms or thickly-set saplings. No! the pretty meadow which rises high above us, backed and almost surrounded by a tall coppice, needs no defence on our side but its own steep bank, garnished with tufts of broom, with pollard oaks wreathed with ivy, and here and there with long patches of hazel overhanging the water. 'Ah, there are still nuts on that bough!' and in an instant my dear companion, active and eager, and delighted as a boy, has hooked down with his walking-stick one of the lissom hazel-stalks, and cleared it of its tawny clusters; and in another moment he has

mounted the bank, and is in the midst of the nuttery, now transferring the spoil from the lower branches into one of his many pockets, now bending the tall tops into the lane, and holding them down by main force, so that I may reach them and enjoy the pleasure of collecting some of the plunder myself. A very great pleasure he knows it will be. I doff my shawl, tuck up my flounces, turn my straw bonnet into a basket, and begin gathering and scrambling-for, manage it how you may, nutting is scrambling work; those boughs, however tightly you may grasp them by the young fragrant twigs and the bright green leaves, will recoil and burst away; but there is a pleasure even in that :-so on we go, scrambling and gathering with all our might and all our glee.

Oh, what an enjoyment this nut-gathering is! The nuts are so full that we lose half of them from over-ripeness; they drop from the socket at the slightest motion. But if we lose, there is one who finds. May is as fond of nuts as a squirrel, and cracks the shell and extracts the kernel with equal dexterity. Her white glossy head is upturned now to watch them as they fall. See how her neck is thrown back like that of a swan, and how beautifully her folded ears quiver with expectation, and how her quick eye follows the rustling noise, and her light feet dance and pat the ground, and leap up with eagerness, seeming almost sustained in the air, just as I have seen her do when Brush is beating a hedgerow, and she knows from his questing that there is a hare afoot. See, she has caught that nut just before it touched the water; but the water would have been no defence, she fishes them from the bottom, she delves after them among the matted grass-even my bonnet-how beggingly she looks at that! 'Oh, what a pleasure nutting is !-is it not, May? But the pockets are almost full, and so is the basket-bonnet, and that bright watch, the sun, says it is late; and after all it is wrong to rob the poor boys-is it not, May?' May shakes her graceful head denyingly, as if she understood the question.

'And we must go home now-must we not? But we will come nutting again some time or other-shall we not, my May?' MISS MITFORD.

A WISH.

MINE be a cot beside the hill;

A bee-hive's hum shall soothe my ear;
A willowy brook that turns a mill
With many a fall shall linger near.

The swallow oft beneath my thatch
Shall twitter from her clay-built nest;
Oft shall the pilgrims lift the latch,
And share my meal, a welcome guest.

Around my ivied porch shall spring

Each fragrant flower that drinks the dew;
And Lucy, at her wheel, shall sing
In russet gown and apron blue.

The village church among the trees,
Where first our marriage vows were given,
With merry peals shall swell the breeze
And point with taper spire to heaven.

S. ROGERS.

THE SHAW.

THE Shaw, leading to Hannah Bint's habitation, is a very pretty mixture of wood and coppice; that is to say, a tract of thirty or forty acres covered with fine growing timber-ash, and oak, and elm, very regularly planted; and interspersed here and there with large patches of underwood, hazel, maple, birch, holly, and hawthorn, woven into almost impenetrable

thickets by long wreaths of the bramble, the briony, and the brier-rose, or by the pliant and twisting garlands of the wild honeysuckle. In other parts, the Shaw is quite clear of its bosky undergrowth, and clothed only with large beds of feathery fern, or carpets of flowers,-primroses, orchises, cowslips, ground-ivy, crane's-bill, cotton grass, Solomon's seal, and forget-me-not, crowded together with a profusion and brilliancy of colour, such as I have rarely seen equalled even in a garden. Here the wild hyacinth really enamels the ground with its fresh and lovely purple; there,

'On aged roots, with bright green mosses clad,

Dwells the wood-sorrel, with its bright thin leaves
Heart-shaped and triply folded, and its root
Creeping like beaded coral; whilst around
Flourish the copse's pride, anemones,
With rays like golden studs on ivory laid
Most delicate; but, touch'd with purple clouds,
Fit crown for April's fair but changeful brow.'

The variety is much greater than my list of flowers would lead one to suppose; for the ground is so unequal, now swelling in gentle ascents, now dimpling into dells and hollows, and the soil so different in different parts, that the sylvan flora is unusually extensive and complete.

The season is, however, now too late for this floweriness; the tufted woodbines have indeed continued in bloom during the whole of this lovely autumn, and there are lingering yet some garlands of the purple wild vetch, which wreathe themselves round the thickets, and blend with the ruddy leaves of the bramble, and the pale festoons of the briony; otherwise there is little to divert one's attention from the grander beauties of the trees;-the sycamore, its broad leaves already spotted; the oak, heavy with acorns; the delicate shining rind of the weeping birch, 'the lady of the woods,' thrown out in strong relief from a background of holly and hawthorn; and the beech already beginning to assume the rich tawny hue which makes it perhaps the most picturesque of autumnal trees, as

the transparent freshness of its young foliage is undoubtedly the choicest ornament of the forest in spring.

A sudden turn round one of these magnificent beeches brings us to the boundary of the Shaw, and leaning upon a rude gate, we look over on an open space of about ten acres of ground, still more varied and broken than that which we have passed, and surrounded on all sides by thick woodland. As a piece of colour, nothing can well be finer. The ruddy glow of the heath-flower contrasts on the one hand with the golden-blossomed furze on the other with a patch of buckwheat, of which the bloom is not past, although the grain be ripening, the beautiful buck-wheat, whose transparent leaves and stalks are so brightly tinged with vermilion, while the delicate pink-white of the flower, a paler persicaria, has a feathery fall, at once rich and graceful, and a fresh and reviving odour, like that of birch-trees in the dew of a May evening. The bank that surmounts this attempt at cultivation is crowned with the late fox-glove and the stately mullein ; the pasture of which so great a part of the waste consists, looks as green as an emerald; a clear pond, with the bright sky reflected in it, lets light into the picture; the white cottage of the keeper peeps from the opposite coppice; and the vine-covered dwelling of Hannah Bint rises from amidst the pretty garden, which lies bathed in the sunshine around it.

MISS MITFORD.

THE COPPICE IN OCTOBER.

THE roads through the coppice are studiously wild, so that they have the appearance of mere cart-tracks; and the manner in which the ground is tumbled about, the steep declivities, the sunny slopes, the sudden swells and falls--now a close narrow valley, then a sharp ascent to an eminence commanding an immense extent of prospect-have a striking air of natural beauty, developed and heightened by the