erence between the Field and the Wild is the
difference between the old England of Madam How's making, and the new
England which she has taught man to make, carrying on what she had only
begun and had not time to finish.

That moor is a pattern bit left to show what the greater part of this
land was like for long ages after it had risen out of the sea; when there
was little or nothing on the flat upper moors save heaths, and ling, and
club-mosses, and soft gorse, and needle-whin, and creeping willows; and
furze and fern upon the brows; and in the bottoms oak and ash, beech and
alder, hazel and mountain ash, holly and thorn, with here and there an
aspen or a buckthorn (berry-bearing alder as you call it), and
everywhere--where he could thrust down his long root, and thrust up his
long shoots--that intruding conqueror and insolent tyrant, the bramble.
There were sedges and rushes, too, in the bogs, and coarse grass on the
forest pastures--or "leas" as we call them to this day round here--but no
real green fields; and, I suspect, very few gay flowers, save in spring
the sheets of golden gorse, and in summer the purple heather. Such was
old England--or rather, such was this land before it was England; a far
sadder, damper, poorer land than now. For one man or one cow or sheep
which could have lived on it then, a hundred can live now. And yet, what
it was once, that it might become again,--it surely would round here, if
this brave English people died out of it, and the land was left to itself
once more.

What would happen then, you may guess for yourself, from what you see
happen whenever the land is left to itself, as it is in the wood above.
In that wood you can still see the grass ridges and furrows which show
that it was once ploughed and sown by man; perhaps as late as the time of
Henry the Eighth, when a great deal of poor land, as you will read some
day, was thrown out of tillage, to become forest and down once more. And
what is the mount now? A jungle of oak and beech, cherry and holly,
young and old all growing up together, with the mountain ash and bramble
and furze coming up so fast beneath them, that we have to cut the paths
clear again year by year. Why, even the little cow-wheat, a very old-
world plant, which only grows in ancient woods, has found its way back
again, I know not whence, and covers the open spaces with its pretty
yellow and white flowers. Man had conquered this mount, you see, from
Madam