and the brooks crowded with green flags.

Haws are very plentiful this year (1881), and exceptionally large, many
fully double the size commonly seen. So heavily are the branches laden
with bunches of the red fruit that they droop as apple trees do with a
more edible burden. Though so big, and to all appearance tempting to
birds, none have yet been eaten; and, indeed, haws seem to be resorted
to only as a change unless severe weather compels.

Just as we vary our diet, so birds eat haws, and not many of them till
driven by frost and snow. If any stay on till the early months of next
year, wood-pigeons and missel-thrushes will then eat them; but at this
season they are untouched. Blackbirds will peck open the hips directly
the frost comes; the hips go long before the haws. There was a large
crop of mountain-ash berries, every one of which has been taken by
blackbirds and thrushes, which are almost as fond of them as of garden
fruit.

Blackberries are thick, too--it is a berry year--and up in the
horse-chestnut the prickly-coated nuts hang up in bunches, as many as
eight in a stalk. Acorns are large, but not so singularly numerous as
the berries, nor are hazel-nuts. This provision of hedge fruit no more
indicates a severe winter than a damaged wheat harvest indicates a mild
one.

There is something wrong with elm trees. In the early part of this
summer, not long after the leaves were fairly out upon them, here and
there a branch appeared as if it had been touched with red-hot iron and
burnt up, all the leaves withered and browned on the boughs. First one
tree was thus affected, then another, then a third, till, looking round
the fields, it seemed as if every fourth or fifth tree had thus been
burnt.

It began with the leaves losing colour, much as they do in autumn, on
the particular bough; gradually they faded, and finally became brown and
of course dead. As they did not appear to shrivel up, it looked as if
the grub or insect, or whatever did the mischief, had attacked, not the
leaves, but the bough itself. Upon mentioning this I found that it had
been noticed in elm avenues and groups a hundred miles distant, so that
it is not a local circumstance.

As far as yet appears, the elms do not seem materially injured, the
damage being outwardly confined to the bough attacked. These brown spots
looked very remarkable just after the trees had become green. They were
quite distinct from the damage caused by the snow of