gone, they will be missed more than the amateurs of agricultural
artistry imagine at the present moment. What some one has said of
the peasantry, may be said, with almost equal deprecation, of these
picturesque tit-bits of land, which,--

"Once destroyed, never can be supplied."

And destroyed they will be, as sure as science. As large farms are
swallowing up the little ones between them, so large fields are
swallowing these interesting patches, the broad-bottomed hedging of
which sometimes measures as many square yards as the space it
encloses.

There is much reason to fear that the hedge-trees will, in the end,
meet with a worse fate still. Practical farmers are beginning to
look upon them with an evil eye--an eye sharp and severe with
pecuniary speculation; that looks at an oak or elm with no artist's
reverence; that darts a hard, dry, timber-estimating glance at the
trunk and branches; that looks at the circumference of its cold
shadow on the earth beneath, not at the grand contour and glorious
leafage of its boughs above. The farmer who was taking us over his
large and highly-cultivated fields, was a man of wide intelligence,
of excellent tastes, and the means wherewithal to give them free
scope and play. His library would have satisfied the ambition of a
student of history or belles-lettres. His gardens, lawn, shrubbery,
and flowers would grace the mansion of an independent gentleman. He
had an eye to the picturesque as well as practical. But I could not
but notice, as significant of the tendency to which I have referred,
that, on passing a large, outbranching oak standing in the boundary
of two fields, he remarked that the detriment of its shadow could