to bend its head to the ground, no matter the number or direction of the slug's insidious tunnellings and perforations. If you glance at a fern clump as you ride along the road or climb the mountain steep, the yellow, withered fronds of an occasional plant, here and there painfully conspicuous amid the rich, dark, emerald green of its healthy companions, tell you where the grey slug--and a nasty, slimy little wretch it is--is busy at its evil work, drinking up, like consumption among the human race, the very heart's blood, so to speak, of the fairest and finest plants it can find. We have found in our own experience that the best protection of the potato from its ravages is to give the ground a sprinkling of lime just as the plants are appearing above ground, about the end of April or beginning of May. For the early varieties usually planted in our gardens, a sprinkling of soot is less unsightly and equally efficacious with lime. And speaking of the bracken, let us observe that, while it is a magnificent and beautiful plant, it is, like everything else of beauty, most beautiful in its proper place. Meet it on mountain slope, in copsewood covert, or greenwood glade, and you cannot admire it sufficiently. In the end of autumn, particularly when its graceful fronds have assumed a certain indescribable tinge of mingled brown and ruby and gold, a bracken covert is beyond measure lovely. At such a stage, and in the warm and mellow light of the setting September sun, it is to ourselves all that an ocean of broom in flower was to the great Linnæus. If, however, you live in the near neighbourhood of brackens, you will find that it is apt to creep down from its proper wild and upland habitat, and to encroach unduly upon your old grass lands, wherever it can get an undisturbed footing. If you consult books on the subject, they will tell you that if you cut them down for a season or two running before they ripen, they will die away and disappear. With our large, soft-stemmed herbaceous plants, this method of eradication is sometimes effectual enough; with the bracken, as we know to our cost, it avails nothing. The roots are so curiously ramified and intertwined that they will live on and put forth a new growth year after year, no matter how constantly and closely you cut and crop them. We gave up trying a plan so futile, and only hit upon the right way of dealing with them by the merest accident. Walking along the edge of one of our old grass parks about mid-June some few years ago, we wished to get hold of a switch or something similar, wherewith to drive a fractious pony on before us to the park gate. There was no switch just then at hand, and, without thinking of it, we bent down, and with both hands pulled steadily and straight upwards at one of the largest of a luxuriant bracken patch that skirted the path beside us. To our surprise the plant came up easily and from the very root, or we should rather say with the very