intention of the Topiarist to form one or more letters of the alphabet, trees for the purpose should if possible be selected some years before being wanted, and should be prepared for the work intended. Trees that are so prepared beforehand will immediately they are planted in the garden be in a fit condition to shape into letters at once. If the trees are treated in this way, it will in a marked degree do away with the necessity of keeping the letters for several years in the garden in the ugly first stages of formation. There must, of course, be always a time when any tree that is being trained looks unsightly to the person who is new to the art of Topiary work. In the training of letters especially, it will be found much safer, and certainly a great deal easier, if iron frameworks are used. This certainly simplifies the work to a great extent. By using a light framework, a more equally proportioned letter can be made than will be the case if the more rough and ready method of using wooden supports be practised. Of course it is quite possible to train almost any letter, and succeed in making a fairly good job of it, with the aid of a little assistance in the shape of a few wooden supports, etc. But wood is never very satisfactory, for this reason—that when it is used, it will have to be in most cases green, in order to make it pliable and easy to bend. Green wood has a tendency to decay very soon, and the first strong winds that come will very likely break the supports, and blow the whole thing to pieces, or at least damage it so as to make it require to be re-trained again. In the process of training yew or any other tree into letters, the appearance of each letter will be greatly improved if from one and a half to two feet of stem be left between the ground and the commencement of the letter. This stem should be afterwards planted round with small boxwood trees, and clipped so as to form a pedestal, which may be of any shape desired. There are two ways or shapes into which letters can be trained, either the round or the square. The square way of training them is the one I would strongly recommend to my readers, from an ornamental point of view, but it is at the same time the most difficult method. As I explained in my last chapter, anything with square edges is more difficult to clip exactly right than a round object.