Blessed are the enthusiasts. It is true that they are sometimes egregious bores, but they are never so bad as the iconoclasts, and they do much good in the world. Before the murder of the famous mulberry tree Edward Capell, the Shakespearian commentator, whose work rather fell under the cruel lash of Dr. Johnson, had managed to secure a cutting of it, which he carried to Troston Hall, his place in Suffolk, and planted in his garden. There is no easier tree to propagate than the mulberry; in that respect, it is like the willow. Cut a branch of it and stick it in the ground, and when the spring comes it will begin to show signs of life. Lurking in mysterious hiding-places in the bark are myriads of tiny unsuspected buds, full of life and vigour, which in due season will send down little slender fibres till they reach the soil, whence they derive nourishment; in time the buds will burst their prison of bark, and before many years are past a new tree will bear fruit. So Mr. Capell’s cutting throve amazingly and gave birth to a little colony of offshoots. How or when I know not, Troston passed into the possession of Mr. Lofft, and he, when about to let the place and disperse his collection of plants, wrote to Sir William Thiselton Dyer, October 6th, 1896, offering “some scions of Shakespeare’s tree” to Kew. I at once wrote, begging for one of these scions, that it might be planted in Buckingham Palace Gardens—the site of the old mulberry plantation of King James. What more appropriate home could be found for it? There still stands, by the by, in the Palace grounds a venerable mulberry tree which must be the one last relic of King James’s attempt at silk-worm cultivation.