ly one of the Channel Islands that is enriched with
"blossoms of gold." In the sister island of Guernsey the prickly gorse
is much used for hedges, and Sir George Head remarks that the premises
of a Guernsey farmer are thus as impregnably fortified and secured as if
his grounds were surrounded by a stone wall. In the Isle of Man the
furze grows so high that it is sometimes more like a fir tree than the
ordinary plant.

There is an old proverb:--"When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out
of fashion"--that is _never_. The gorse blooms all the year.

FERN.

I'll seek the shaggy fern-clad hill
And watch, 'mid murmurs muttering stern,
The seed departing from the fern
Ere wakeful demons can convey
The wonder-working charm away.

_Leyden_.

"The green and graceful Fern" (_filices_) with its exquisite tracery
must not be overlooked. It recalls many noble home-scenes to British
eyes. Pliny says that "of ferns there are two kinds, and they bear
neither flowers nor seed." And this erroneous notion of the fern bearing
no seed was common amongst the English even so late as the time of
Addison who ridicules "a Doctor that had arrived at the knowledge of the
green and red dragon, _and had discovered the female fern-seed_." The
seed is very minute and might easily escape a careless eye. In the
present day every one knows that the seed of the fern lies on the under
side of the leaves, and a single leaf will often bear some millions of
seeds. Even those amongst the vulgar who believed the plant bore seed,
had an idea that the seeds were visible only at certain mysterious
seasons and to favored individuals who by carrying a quantity of it on
their person, were able, like those who wore the helmet of Pluto or the
ring of Gyges, to walk unseen amidst a crowd. The seed was supposed to
be best seen at a certain hour of the night on which St. John the
Baptist was born.

We have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible,

_Shakespeare's Henry IV. Part I_.

In Beaumont's and Fletcher's _Fair Maid of the Inn_, is the following
allusion to the fern.

--Had you Gyges' ring,
_Or the herb that gives invisibility_.

Ben Jonson makes a similar allusion to it:

I had
No medicine, sir, to go invisible,
_No fern-seed in my pocket_.

Pope puts a branch of spleen-wort, a species of fern, (_Asplenium
trichomanes_) into the hand of a gnome as a protection from