itself upon the spray, in the month of pelting showers and laughing sunshine, when the first note of the cuckoo is heard from the ash in the hedge-row or the wild cherry in the woods, an old custom still proclaims a holiday in honour of his arrival. When the last lingering feature of winter has vanished; when brooks, no longer hoarse, sink their voices to a tinkling sweetness, flooding mead and dingle with their music; when the merry, merry month, although no longer celebrated for its floral shows and games as formerly, arrives, the May-bush may be seen over the door of the village smithy and on the heads of horses on the road. It would have been of little use passing acts of Parliament, like the one which has just become law, for the preservation of members of the feathered tribes, if their native woods had not been preserved to us by sportsmen. To have lost our woods would have been to have lost the spring and summer residences of migratory birds: to have lost the laugh of the woodpecker, the songs of the blackbird and the thrush, the woodlark’s thrilling melody, and the nightingale’s inimitable notes, to say nothing of those faint soothing shadowings which steal upon one from these leafy labyrinths of nature. As some one taking deeper views has said:— “There lie around Thy daily walk great store of beauteous things, Each in its separate place most fair, and all Of many parts disposed most skilfully, Making in combination wonderful An individual of a higher kind; And that again in order ranging well With its own fellows, till thou rise at length Up to the majesty of this grand world;— Hard task, and seldom reached by mortal souls, For frequent intermission and neglect Of close communion with the humblest things; But in rare moments, whether memory Hold compact with invention, or the door Of heaven hath been a little pushed aside, Methinks I can remember, after hours Of unpremeditated thought in woods.” CONTENTS.