Many English houses are covered with creepers which are green in the summer and then turn to red--to blood-red at times--before the leaves finally drop and leave the house naked. This is the Virginia Creeper, which did not originally grow in Britain, but was brought from America. And here is a church clothed with red Virginia Creeper. Green ivy is a creeper native to Britain. It clothes with green many old buildings throughout the winter, because its leaves are like leather, and thick, and can withstand the cold. [Sidenote: 54. Leafless Elm Trees.] This is a December landscape. The trees have shed their leaves, and their naked boughs are clear against the sky. See the bleak appearance of the land, so that you may look over miles and miles of open country, though it is studded with many trees. To the eye of one accustomed to the tropical forest, England in the winter time is a naked and strange land. [Sidenote: 55. Cottage, Winter Scene.] [Sidenote: 56. Winter Scene in Wood.] [Sidenote: 57. Frozen Lake side with hoar-frost.] [Sidenote: 58. Hockey on ice.] There are times when the cold is such that the rain is frozen and falls in hard stones, known as hail, and there are other times when the clouds themselves freeze, and then there fall white snow-flakes like little feathers, which accumulate on the ground, covering it with a white carpet which melts into water and disappears when the weather grows warm again. Here is a country cottage half buried in snow, and the snow is on the road and on the branches of the trees. And here is a wood-side, hung not with snow, but with hoar-frost. You know how dew stands on the leaves in the early morning. In Britain, in the winter time, the dew clings to the branches not as liquid water, but as a white feathery substance like snow, and yet it is not snow, for it has not fallen from the clouds in flakes, but has been formed from the air around, and clings by little stalks to all the branches, surrounding them and clothing them. Here is yet another scene of hoar-frost. The surface of the pool is frozen over, and has a covering of hard ice. All the ground is hard like iron; men cannot dig with spades, and even horses cannot draw the plough through the ground. The cattle are gathered into the sheds of the farms, where they are fed upon the hay which was saved for them in the summer. The nights are very long and the days are short--not like the tropical day and night, each approximately twelve hours in length. Even poor men must now be idle, and many spend time in active sports. Here, for instance, the game of hockey is being played on the ice, which is strong enough to bear people upon it safely. Here is one of the roots of the energy of the British race; it is bred in a climate which is warm enough for men to work in through most of the year but with every now and then a spell of frost, which appears to stimulate human activity. On the other hand the heat of the summer is rarely such