copse; I am sure we shall find no worse malefactors than ourselves--
shall we, May?--and the sooner we get out of sight of the sheep the
better; for Brindle seems meditating another attack. Allons,
messieurs, over this gate, across this meadow, and here is the
copse.'

How boldly that superb ash-tree with its fine silver bark rises from
the bank, and what a fine entrance it makes with the holly beside
it, which also deserves to be called a tree! But here we are in the
copse. Ah! only one half of the underwood was cut last year, and
the other is at its full growth: hazel, brier, woodbine, bramble,
forming one impenetrable thicket, and almost uniting with the lower
branches of the elms, and oaks, and beeches, which rise at regular
distances overhead. No foot can penetrate that dense and thorny
entanglement; but there is a walk all round by the side of the wide
sloping bank, walk and bank and copse carpeted with primroses, whose
fresh and balmy odour impregnates the very air. Oh how exquisitely
beautiful! and it is not the primroses only, those gems of flowers,
but the natural mosaic of which they form a part; that network of
ground-ivy, with its lilac blossoms and the subdued tint of its
purplish leaves, those rich mosses, those enamelled wild hyacinths,
those spotted arums, and above all those wreaths of ivy linking all
those flowers together with chains of leaves more beautiful than
blossoms, whose white veins seem swelling amidst the deep green or
splendid brown;--it is the whole earth that is so beautiful! Never
surely were primroses so richly set, and never did primroses better
deserve such a setting. There they are of their own lovely yellow,
the hue to which they have given a name, the exact tint of the
butterfly that overhangs them (the first I have seen this year! can
spring really be coming at last?)--sprinkled here and there with