Boys will now be seen in the evening twilight with match, gunpowder,
&c., and green boughs for self-defence, busy in storming the paper-built
castles of _wasps_, the larvae of which furnish anglers with store of
excellent baits. Spring-flowers have given place to a very different
class. Climbing plants mantle and festoon every hedge. The wild hop, the
brione, the clematis or traveller's joy, the large white convolvulus,
whose bold yet delicate flowers will display themselves to a very late
period of the year--vetches, and white and yellow ladies-bed-straw--
invest almost every bush with their varied beauty, and breathe on the
passer-by their faint summer sweetness. The _campanula rotundifolia_,
the hare-bell of poets, and the blue-bell of botanists, arrests the eye
on every dry bank, rock, and wayside, with its beautiful cerulean bells.
There too we behold wild scabiouses, mallows, the woody nightshade,
wood-betony, and centaury; the red and white-striped convolvulus also
throws its flowers under your feet; corn fields glow with whole armies
of scarlet poppies, cockle, and the rich azure plumes of
viper's-bugloss; even _thistles_, the curse of Cain, diffuse a glow of
beauty over wastes and barren places. Some species, particularly the
musk thistles, are really noble plants, wearing their formidable arms,
their silken vest, and their gorgeous crimson tufts of fragrant flowers
issuing from a coronal of interwoven down and spines, with a grace which
casts far into the shade many a favourite of the garden.

But whoever would taste all the sweetness of July, let him go, in
pleasant company, if possible, into heaths and woods; it is there, in
her uncultured haunts, that summer now holds her court. The stern
castle, the lowly convent, the deer and the forester have vanished
thence many ages; yet nature still casts round the forest-lodge, the
gnarled oak and lovely mere, the same charms as ever. The most hot and