This is the month of harvest. The crops usually begin with rye and oats, proceed with wheat, and finish with pease and beans. Harvest-home is still the greatest rural holiday in England, because it concludes at once the most laborious and most lucrative of the farmer's employments, and unites repose and profit. Thank heaven, there are, and must be, seasons of some repose in agricultural employments, or the countryman would work with as unceasing a madness, and contrive to be almost as diseased and unhealthy as the citizen. But here again, and for the reasons already mentioned, our holiday-making is not what it was. Our ancestors used to burst into an enthusiasm of joy at the end of harvest, and even mingled their previous labour with considerable merry-making, in which they imitated the equality of the earlier ages. They crowned the wheat-sheaves with flowers, they sung, they shouted, they danced, they invited each other, or met to feast as at Christmas, in the halls of rich houses; and, what was a very amiable custom, and wise beyond the commoner wisdom that may seem to lie on the top of it, every one that had been concerned, man, woman, and child, received a little present, ribbons, laces, or sweetmeats. The number of flowers is now sensibly diminished. Those that flower newly are nigella, zinnias, polyanthuses, love-apples, mignonette, capsicums, Michaelmas daisies, auriculus, asters or stars, and China-asters. The additional trees and shrubs in flower are the tamarisk, altheas, Venetian sumach, pomegranates, the beautiful passion-flower, the trumpet flower, and the virgin's bower or clematis, which is such a quick and handsome climber. But the quantity of fruit is considerably multiplied, especially that of pears, peaches, apricots, and grapes. And if the little delicate white flowers have at last withdrawn from the hot sun, the wastes, marshes, and woods are dressed in the luxuriant attire of ferns and heaths, with all their varieties of green, purple, and gold. A piece of waste land, especially where the ground is broken up into little inequalities, as Hampstead-heath, for instance, is now a most bright as well as picturesque object; all the ground, which is in light, giving the sun, as it were, gold for gold. Mignonette, intended to flower in winter, should now be planted in pots, and have the benefit of a warm situation. Seedlings in pots should have the morning sunshine, and annuals in pots be frequently watered. In the middle of this month, the young goldfinch broods appear, lapwings congregate, thistle-down floats, and birds resume their spring songs:--a little afterwards flies abound in windows, linnets congregate, and bulls make their shrill autumnal bellowing; and towards the end the beech tree turns yellow,--the first symptom of approaching autumn.[1] [1] _The Months_. * * * * * SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS. * * * * * LEOPARD-HUNTING.