not have been less than ten shillings a year for half a century. As
we proceeded from field to field, he recurred to the same subject by
calling our attention to the circumference of the shadow cast on the
best land of the farm by a thrifty, luxuriant ash, not more than a
foot in diameter at the butt. Up to the broad rim of its shade, the
wheat on each side of the hedge was thick, heavyheaded and tall, but
within the cool and sunless circle the grain and grass were so pale
and sickly that the bare earth would have been relief to a farmer's
eye.

The three great, distinctive graces of an English landscape are the
hawthorn hedges, the hedge-row trees, and the everlasting and
unapproachable greenness of the grass-fields they surround and
embellish. In these beautiful features, England surpasses all other
countries in the world. These make the peculiar charm of her rural
scenery to a traveller from abroad. These are the salient
lineaments of Motherland's face which the memories of myriads she
has sent to people countries beyond the sea cling to with such
fondness; memories that are transmitted from generation to
generation; which no political revolutions nor severances affect;
which are handed down in the unwritten legends of family life in the
New World, as well as in the warp and woof of American literature
and history. Will the utilitarian and unsparing science of these
latter days, or of the days to come, shear away these beautiful
tresses, and leave the brow and temples of the Old Country they have
graced bare and brown under the bald and burning sun of material
economy? It is not an idle question, nor too early to ask it. It
is a question which will interest more millions of the English race
on the American continent than these home-islands will ever contain.
There are influences at work which tend to this unhappy issue. Some