Our flowers, like our birds and wild creatures, are more shy and retiring than the British. They keep more to the woods, and are not sowed so broadcast. Herb Robert is exclusively a wood plant with us, but in England it strays quite out into the open fields and by the roadside. Indeed, in England I found no so-called wood flower that could not be met with more or less in the fields and along the hedges. The main reason, perhaps, is that the need of shelter is never so great there, neither winter nor summer, as it is here, and the supply of moisture is more uniform and abundant. In dampness, coolness, and shadiness, the whole climate is woodsy, while the atmosphere of the woods themselves is almost subterranean in its dankness and chilliness. The plants come out for sun and warmth, and every seed they scatter in this moist and fruitful soil takes. How many exclusive wood flowers we have, most of our choicest kinds being of sylvan birth,--flowers that seem to vanish before the mere breath of cultivated fields, as wild as the partridge and the beaver, like the yellow violet, the arbutus, the medeola, the dicentra, the claytonia, the trilliums, many of the orchids, uvularia, dalibarda, and others. In England, probably, all these plants, if they grew there, would come out into the fields and opens. The wild strawberry, however, reverses this rule; it is more a wood plant in England than with us. Excepting the rarer variety (_Fragaria vesca_), our strawberry thrives best in cultivated fields, and Shakespeare's reference to this fruit would not be apt,-- "The strawberry grows underneath the nettle; And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best, Neighbor'd by fruit of baser quality." The British strawberry is found exclusively, I believe, in woods and copses, and the ripened fruit is smaller or lighter colored than our own. Nature in this island is less versatile than with us, but more constant and uniform, less variety and contrast in her works, and less capriciousness and reservation also. She is chary of new species, but multiplies the old ones endlessly. I did not observe so many varieties of wild flowers as at home, but a great profusion of specimens; her lap is fuller, but the kinds are fewer. Where you find one of a kind, you will find ten thousand. Wordsworth saw "golden daffodils," "Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way,"