, and the victory may not always incline
to the right side, I should be very sorry to lead the Soldan to fight
his battles over again. We will take nobody but May.

So saying, we proceeded on our way through winding lanes, between
hedgerows tenderly green, till we reached the hatch-gate, with the white
cottage beside it embosomed in fruit-trees, which forms the entrance to
the Pinge, and in a moment the whole scene was before our eyes.

'Is not this beautiful, Ellen?' The answer could hardly be other than
a glowing rapid 'Yes!'--A wood is generally a pretty place; but
this wood--Imagine a smaller forest, full of glades and sheep-walks,
surrounded by irregular cottages with their blooming orchards, a clear
stream winding about the brakes, and a road intersecting it, and giving
life and light to the picture; and you will have a faint idea of the
Pinge. Every step was opening a new point of view, a fresh combination
of glade and path and thicket. The accessories too were changing every
moment. Ducks, geese, pigs, and children, giving way, as we advanced
into the wood, to sheep and forest ponies; and they again disappearing
as we became more entangled in its mazes, till we heard nothing but the
song of the nightingale, and saw only the silent flowers.

What a piece of fairy land! The tall elms overhead just bursting into
tender vivid leaf, with here and there a hoary oak or a silver-barked
beech, every twig swelling with the brown buds, and yet not quite
stripped of the tawny foliage of autumn; tall hollies and hawthorn
beneath, with their crisp brilliant leaves mixed with the white
blossoms of the sloe, and woven together with garlands of woodbines and
wild-briers;--what a fairy land!

Primroses, cowslips, pansies, and the regular open-eyed white blossom
of the wood anemone (or, to use the more elegant Hampshire name, the
windflower), were set under our feet as thick as daisies in a meadow;
but the pretty weed that we came to seek was coyer; and Ellen began
to fear that we had mistaken the place or the season.--At last she had
herself the pleasure of finding it under a brake of holly--'Oh, look!
look! I am sure that this is the wood-sorrel! Look at the pendent white
flower, shaped like a snowdrop and veined with purple streaks, and the
beautiful trefoil leaves folded like a heart,--some, the young ones, so
vividly yet tenderly green that the foliage of the elm and the hawthorn
would show dully at their side,--others of