Boys will now be seen in the evening twilight with match, gunpowder, &c., and green boughs for self-defence, busy in storming the paper-built castles of _wasps_, the larvae of which furnish anglers with store of excellent baits. Spring-flowers have given place to a very different class. Climbing plants mantle and festoon every hedge. The wild hop, the brione, the clematis or traveller's joy, the large white convolvulus, whose bold yet delicate flowers will display themselves to a very late period of the year--vetches, and white and yellow ladies-bed-straw-- invest almost every bush with their varied beauty, and breathe on the passer-by their faint summer sweetness. The _campanula rotundifolia_, the hare-bell of poets, and the blue-bell of botanists, arrests the eye on every dry bank, rock, and wayside, with its beautiful cerulean bells. There too we behold wild scabiouses, mallows, the woody nightshade, wood-betony, and centaury; the red and white-striped convolvulus also throws its flowers under your feet; corn fields glow with whole armies of scarlet poppies, cockle, and the rich azure plumes of viper's-bugloss; even _thistles_, the curse of Cain, diffuse a glow of beauty over wastes and barren places. Some species, particularly the musk thistles, are really noble plants, wearing their formidable arms, their silken vest, and their gorgeous crimson tufts of fragrant flowers issuing from a coronal of interwoven down and spines, with a grace which casts far into the shade many a favourite of the garden.