sundew except under penalty of death. Only two other English counties--York and Cornwall--lend their name to a wild-flower, so that Lancashire may still be proud of its classic asphodel. No single kind of wild-flower occurs in Lancashire so abundantly as to give character to the county, nor is it marked by any particular kind of fern. The most general, perhaps, is the broad-leaved sylvan shield-fern (_Lastrea dilatata_), though in some parts superseded by the amber-spangled polypody. Neither is any one kind of tree more conspicuous than another, unless it be the sycamore. Fair dimensions are attained by the wych-elm, which in Lancashire holds the place given south of Birmingham to that princely exotic, the _campestris_--the "ancestral elm" of the poet, and chief home of the sable rook--a tree of comparative rarity, and in Lancashire never majestic. The wild cherry is often remarkable also for its fine development, especially north of the sands. The abele, on the other hand, the maple, and the silver willow, are seldom seen; and of the spindle-tree, the wayfaring-tree, and the dogwood, there is scarcely an example. They do not blend in Lancashire, as in the south, with the crimson pea and the pencilled wood-vetch. When a climber of the summer, after the bindweed, ascends the hedge, it is the Tamus, that charming plant which never seems so much to have risen out of the earth as to be a cataract of foliage tumbling from some hidden fount above. Wood-nuts are plentiful in the northern parts of the county; and in the southern wild raspberries, these equal in flavour and fragrance to those of garden growth, wanting only in size. Bistort makes pink islands amid hay grass that waits the scythe. Foxgloves as tall as a man adorn all dry and shady groves. The golden-rod, the water septfoil, and the Lady's mantle, require no searching for. At Blackpool the sea-rocket blooms again towards Christmas. On the extremest verge of the county, where a leap across the streamlet would plant the feet in Westmoreland, the banks are dotted for many miles with the bird's-eye primula. THE BIRDS[46] [46] Condensed in part from the chapter on Lancashire Birds in _Manchester Walks and Wild-flowers_, 1858, long since out of print. With the Lancashire birds, as with the botany, it is not the exhaustive catalogue that possesses the prime interest. This lies in the habits, the odd and pretty ways, the instincts, the songs, the migrations, that lift birds, in their endless variety, so near to our own personal human nature.