for the ground is
so unequal, now swelling in gentle ascents, now dimpling into dells and
hollows, and the soil so different in different parts, that the sylvan
Flora is unusually extensive and complete.

The season is, however, now too late for this floweriness; and except
the tufted woodbines, which have continued in bloom during the whole
of this lovely autumn, and some lingering garlands of the purple wild
vetch, wreathing round the thickets, and uniting with the ruddy leaves
of the bramble, and the pale festoons of the briony, there is little
to call one's attention from the grander beauties of the trees--the
sycamore, its broad leaves already spotted--the oak, heavy with
acorns--and the delicate shining rind of the weeping birch, 'the lady of
the woods,' thrown out in strong relief from a background of holly and
hawthorn, each studded with coral berries, and backed with old beeches,
beginning to assume the rich tawny hue which makes them perhaps the most
picturesque of autumnal trees, as the transparent freshness of their
young foliage is undoubtedly the choicest ornament of the forest in
spring.

A sudden turn round one of these magnificent beeches brings us to the
boundary of the Shaw, and leaning upon a rude gate, we look over an open
space of about ten acres of ground, still more varied and broken
than that which we have passed, and surrounded on all sides by thick
woodland. As a piece of colour, nothing can be well finer. The ruddy
glow of the heath-flower, contrasting, on the one hand, with the
golden-blossomed furze--on the other, with a patch of buck-wheat,
of which the bloom is not past, although the grain be ripening, the
beautiful buck-wheat, whose transparent leaves and stalks are so
brightly tinged with vermilion, while the delicate pink-white of the
flower, a paler persicaria, has a feathery fall, at once so rich and so
graceful, and a fresh and reviving odour, like that of birch trees
in the dew of a May evening. The bank that surmounts this attempt at
cultivation is crowned with the late foxglove and the stately mullein;
the pasture of which so great a part of the waste consists, looks as
green as an emerald; a clear pond, with the bright sky reflected in it,
lets light into the picture; the white cottage of the keeper peeps from
the opposite coppice; and the vine-covered dwelling of Hannah Bint rises
from amidst the pretty garden, which lies bathed in the sunshine around
it.

The living and m