that with which the wifeless settler entreats the
emigration of women, to render Home possible
in his adopted land. The beau-ideal of domestic
bliss has ever been a Family assembled beneath
the shade of their own tree—no matter what—
fig-tree, vine, olive, oak, or fir. The Northman
who has penetrated to the far South—perhaps,
even, to the valleys of Mull and Argyle—scarcely
knows how to choose between the symmetrical
stature of the pine, the drooping tresses of the
birch, and the leafy arms of the beech, stretched
out to welcome him. They have voices too:
they whisper, they threaten, they lament, they
allure. Go and spend only a month at John
o'Groat's house; on your return to your
woodland park, or your blooming orchard, you will
fully feel the attractive influence of trees.

But all trees are not the same trees. Young
people of English parentage, born and brought
up amidst tropical verdure, sent home to Europe
to complete their education, and arriving in
winter, have been greatly astonished. How
curious! Trees without leaves! And so
intricate and finely-branched! The solid stems
seem to bear a Medusa's head of interlacing
twigs, multitudinous yet orderly, if you examine
their disposition and arrangement. Surely no
gardener's art can keep them alive in that unclad
exposed condition! They must perish, starved
into lifeless brooms! Still, they are graceful,
even in death.

We are walking through the wood after a calm
night of hoar-frost. A mist from the meadow
has been stealing through it, silvering every twig
with an ornament, beside which silver itself is
dull. It is a forest of gigantic ostrich feathers,
such as no Eastern potentate can produce to
decorate the courts of his palace, or to wave
around his mausoleum. The sun breaks forth:
his ray, though feeble, is yet powerful enough to
scatter around us a shower of diamonds. And
then, the snowflakes, as they fall! How
completely novel! What a realisation of the
impossible! The King of Siam might well believe in the
mountain from whose top you may knock a nail
into the sky, while he refused to believe that
water could harden so as to allow an elephant to
walk across a river. And you tell us that, in a
few short weeks, this dazzling scene of barrenness
will be shady, leafy, full of blossoms, song-birds,
and butterflies? We must watch the coming of
the change you call Spring, for no similar changes
are to be witnessed in our ever-green, ever-sultry
Asiatic home.

In another way are we favoured in Great
Britain and Ireland: there are countries which have
a spring, and there are countries which, although
experiencing the extremes of heat and cold, have
none. For a week's great thaw—flooding you
with torrents of dirty water, making roads and
garden-walks alike impassable, depositing the
collected filth of winter wherever the retiring
inundation shall leave it, threatening bridges, and
rendering ferry-boats impossible by an irresistible
stream of fresh-water icebergs—is not a season;
it is a catastrophe, a break-up, for which we
have no word so expressive as the French débâcle.
Neither is the opening of the windows of heaven,
after a six months' or a twelvemonth's drought
—during which the collecting naturalist has to
dig for torpid specimens of insects, spiders, and
lizards, and during which you may pitch your
tent over the spot where a crocodile lies buried
in the hardened soil—Spring. Neither is the
substitution of tepid cataracts from the skies
for whirlwinds of burning dust upraised from
the plain—when lethargic fish, crustaceans,
beetles, snails, not to mention enormous boas,
wake up from their feverish sleep in the hard-
baked mud; when the scanty hortus siccus
still remaining on the land drinks water like
a sponge, and, with a convulsive effort to
profit by the occasion, concentrates its powers
in the production of a few new shoots and
flowers and seeds—neither is this Spring. It
is a resuscitation from the trance almost of
fossil nature; it is a short-enduring spasmodic
manifestation of vitality; but it is not the gentle
yet steady influence which, with us, brings forth
flowers, vegetables, and fruit, each after its kind.
In those regions, whose climate alternates
periodically between parching heats and tempestuous
rains, foretold by earthquakes—in those
regions, daisies, snowdrops, and primroses are
visions of another world; buttercups and butter
are alike unknown; strawberries and cream are
incredible fables; radishes, though not square,
are impossible roots, for you cannot extract
what does not exist; sea-kale and rhubarb
tart are as mythological as the ambrosia of
the gods and goddesses; while the words
"spring salad," "green peas," "asparagus,"
serve merely as spells to bring the water into
your mouth.

There are also countries where, if you like,
you may have no summer, nothing but winter,
then a long spring, and then winter again. For
this, you have not to go very far—that is, the
journey is short in these railroad days. Arriving
in the Oberland in April, you have only to pitch
your tent at the edge of the melting snow,
following it as it retreats upward before the
advancing breath of summer, to behold a succession
of little springs, as the green sward is exposed to
air and sunshine. You will have crocuses in May
and June, and, at the end of August, the dear
little Alpine linaria will be still coming into
bloom at the glacier's edge. You will behold
patches of azure gentian so like a little bit
dropped out of the sky, that you look upward to
see whence it has fallen. The cows and their
keepers are well aware of all this and more.
"Excelsior" is their motto. By constantly
climbing, they contrive to give you spring grass-
butter, and spring cream cheese, until the snows
of October put a sudden extinguisher on vernal
ideas, and drive them all down together to their
well-built stables in the valley.

Spring, in the United Kingdom, is not merely
a lovely sight; it is a pleasant feeling. Lead a