a slight but delicious odour-an odour which does not destroy but mingles with the scent of other blossoms. In the open air the leafage of the appletree is making itself conspicuous, and the throstles are building in good earnest. I wish this bird were as cunning as the starling, or that I could teach it prudence. Here is the starling creeping through a small hole in the tiles to his snug nest. He is out of the reach of boys and safe even from the marauding cat. His sense of security makes him impudent; he stands and looks at you with his head cocked up, and goes in and out of his house with an unnecessary frequency, as if he would say:-'This is where I live, and I don't care if you know it. —a starling's nest is his castle.' throstle, in spite of what, in our You can't follow me But the poor foolish ornamental way, we call unerring instinct, will persist in putting his nest, year after year, where those who seek can both see and reach. On the fifth I observed a throstle gathering dry grass under a pear-tree; it pulled and tugged until it had got so large a bunch in its mouth that it looked absurd and could hardly fly away. The next day I found its nest completed, in a low bush of broad-leaved holly. This bird has a taste for letters, and slender twigs there was in for among the grass woven a considerable piece of a London paper. Al though the outside was rough, the interior was neatly and smoothly plastered with clay, which, when I saw it, was yet moist from the bill of the artificer. On the same day I found another similar nest just finished. The roof of our garden winter-house projects and is supported on rough-hewn posts, which are covered with ivy; against one of these posts the nest is built. It is dexterously worked into the hanging stems of ivy; but it is so low that I can look into it as I pass, and so much exposed that I have tied the tendrils of the ivy more closely round it, both for protection and concealment. It has been plastered with mud, and it is also lined as a piece of luxury, I suppose-with the soft fibres of some decayed wood. Yesterday I found that the first little blue egg had been dropped into the nest which the prescient bird-prescient in preparation if not in selection of place-had finished three days before. And here, too, was beauty, the little-regarded beauty of the bird's egg-beauty of form and of colour, perfect elementary form and delicately simple colour-lavished upon a corner where no eye might ever have seen it-where, probably, by no other eye than my own will it ever be seen. XIV.-THE DAISY. April 17. OUR native flora here is not so abounding in variety as to permit of our disregarding the advent of the simplest flower. I pass, therefore, this week from the common celandine to the still commoner bellis perennis-even its scientific name is a sweet one -the daisy, the flower of the children and of all the poets. Of course we have this flower in every season; like the poor, it is always with us. I have seldom failed to find one, even at Christmas, on a bank under a privet hedge facing the south-west. In such a situation I have seen the hardy little blossom living on and on, through frost and snow, on dark days and on bright, opening timidly at noon, and closing up tightly at three or four o'clock, when the early night was approaching. Under these conditions a single flower is tenderly dwelt upon; it becomes a friend; and an almost sentient recognition seems to pass between you. But now the 'dog-daisy,' as we call it, is beginning to show itself in multitudes. During the present week, for the first time, it has forced itself upon our notice as a salient feature in the carth's floral decoration. By the little water runnel in the meadow we find it mingling with the celandine; in the dell at the bottom of the garden it is side by side with another yellow and somewhat despised, but brilliant flower, the now leafless coltsfoot; along the walks it is seen creeping up between the gravel and the grass border; and on the lawns it is beginning, as usual, to spread itself in patches. The daisy is always in greater numbers than you think. In one small plot I have just counted more than a hundred: if I had been asked to guess I should have said there were twenty. It is now the first thing which I see in the morning. A few days ago I thought the bright little specks, as yet unopened, were only great drops of dew. In fact, the flower, while yet moist, glitters like a pearl in the first beams of the sun. It is no wonder that the children should love the daisy. Its lowliness of situation, its simplicity of shape and of colour, its prodigal profusion, will all commend the flower to them. Is the reader happy enough to remember the time when, as a child, his eyes first fell upon a field of daisies; can he recall the delight which welled up within him when he first found that they were his to enjoy with impunity, even to gather without reproach? Chaucer, who was the sworn knight and impassioned lover of the daisy, makes its place in the year a little later than now. With him it is always the flower of May-May and the daisy are joint symbols of spring. It has been said that Chaucer's many words about the daisy were merely conventional. I do not think there is any proof of that. His love of the flower was both singular and sincere. Shrewd man of the world as he was, courtier and scholar as he was, the heart of the child-the poet's sign, was always present with him. From what we know of him he was just the man to feel about the daisy exactly what he has told us. At the same time there is, of course, occasionally a strain of hyperbole in his language which can only be explained on the supposition that he was speaking of some exalted lady under the figure of his favourite flower. Like a student, he would leave his bed, or the amusements of his time, for the company of his books; like a poet he would leave his books for the companionship of nature. In the prologue to the 'Legende of Goode Women,' he tells us that when the month of May is come, and he hears the song of birds, and sees the flowers begin to spring, then Farwel my boke, and my devocion! Thanne love I most these flourës white and rede, |