The pine in front of my north window began to put forth its catkins some time since; those up the Long Ditton road are now covered thick with the sulphur farina or dust. I fancy three different sets of fruit may sometimes be seen on pines: this year's small and green, last year's ripe and mature, and that of the year before dry and withered. The trees are all in leaf now, except the Turkey oaks--there are some fine young Turkey oaks by Oak Hill Path--and the black poplars. Oaks have been in leaf some time, except those that flower and are now garlanded with green. Ash, too, is now in leaf, and beech. The bees have been humming in the sycamores; the limes are in leaf, but their flower does not come yet. There were round, rosy oak-apples on the oak by the garden in the copse on the 9th. This tree is singular for bearing a crop of these apples every year. Its top was snapped by the snow that fell last October while yet the leaf was on. I think the apples appear on this oak earlier than on any about here. As for the orchards, now they are beautiful with bloom; walking along the hedges, too, you light once now and then on a crab or a wild apple, with its broad rosy petals showing behind the hawthorn. On the 7th I heard a corncrake in the meadow over Thames, opposite the Promenade, a hundred yards below Messenger's Eyot. It is a favourite spot with the corncrake--almost the only place where you are nearly sure to hear him. Crake! crake! So it is now high May, and now midnight. Antares is visible--the summer star. VIGNETTES FROM NATURE I.--SPRING The soft sound of water moving among thousands of grass-blades is to the hearing as the sweetness of spring air to the scent. It is so faint and so diffused that the exact spot whence it issues cannot be discerned, yet it is distinct, and my footsteps are slower as I listen. Yonder, in the corners of the mead, the atmosphere is full of some ethereal vapour. The sunshine stays in the air there as if the green hedges held the wind from brushing it away. Low and plaintive comes the notes of a lapwing; the same notes, but tender with love.