rely
be the hazel-copse! The Hazel (_Corylus avellana_) is never a large
tree. It is, however, long lived, and of luxuriant growth. When cut it
"stoles" or throws up shoots very freely, and when treated so will live
a hundred years. With a single stem, Mr. Loudon assures us, it would
live much longer. Filbert-hazels are a variety with longer nuts. Hazels
are cultivated not only for the nuts, but for corf-rods,[1] hoops,
fencing, &c., and hazel-charcoal, like beech-charcoal, is used for
crayons. Like many other plants, the hazel has two kinds of flowers,
which come out before the leaves. The long pale catkins appear first,
and a little later tiny crimson flowers come where the nuts are
afterwards to be.

Many old superstitions are connected with the hazel. Hazel-rods were
used to "divine" for water and minerals by professors of an art which
received the crack-jaw title of Rhabdomancy. Having tried our own hand
at Rhabdomancy, we are able to say that the freaks of the divining-rod
in sensitive fingers are sometimes as curious as those of a table among
table-turners; and are probably susceptible of similar explanations.

The Larch (_Larix Europaea_, &c.). Though traceable in England for two
hundred years, it is within this century that the larch has been
extensively cultivated for profit. The exact date of its introduction
from the mountain ranges of some other part of Europe is not known, but
there is a popular tradition that it was first brought to Scotland with
some orange-trees from Italy, and having begun to wither under hot-house
treatment, was thrown outside, where it took root and throve thereafter.
The wood of full-grown larch-trees is very valuable. To John, Duke of
Athol, Scotland is indebted for the introduction of larch plantations on
an enormous scale. He is said to have planted 6500 acres of
mountain-ground with these valuable trees, which not only bring in heavy
returns as timber, but so enrich the ground on which they grow, by the
decayed _spicula_ or spines which fall from them, as to increase its
value in the course of some years eight or tenfold. The Duke was buried
in a coffin made of larch-wood! This sounds as if the merits of the
larch-tree had been indeed a hobby with him, but when one comes to
enumerate them one does not wonder that a man should feel his life very
usefully devoted to establishing so valuable a tree in his native
country, and that the pains and pride it brought him should have
awa