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 overstep 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 lissome
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 that vast
variety of pockets which gentlemen carry about them, now bending the
tall tops into the lane, holding them down by main force, so that I
might reach them and enjoy the pleasure of collecting some of the
plunder myself. A very great pleasure he knew it would be. I
doffed my shawl, tucked up my flounces, turned my straw bonnet into
a basket, and began gathering and scrambling--for, manage it how you
may, nutting is scrambling work,--those boughs, however tightly you