the trees were jewels." These fruits, though enticing to the sight, and juicy, are nauseous to the taste. [Illustration: Guelder Rose. A, fruit; B, flowers.] The name Guelder Rose is a strange case of transference from a cultivated to a wild plant: the var. _sterilis_, in which _all_ the flowers are like the outer row in the normal cluster, was first cultivated in Gelderland; so Gerarde tells us that "it is called in Dutch, _Gheldersche Roose_; in English, _Gelder's Rose_." In the Cotswolds it is known as King's Crown, from the "King of the May" having been crowned with a chaplet of it. Another name for it is Water Elder, presumably given on account of the similar appearance of the flower-clusters in _Viburnum_ and _Sambucus_. The distribution of the Guelder Rose as a wild plant extends northwards to Caithness, although it is rare in Scotland. It occurs throughout Ireland. [Illustration: _Pl. 129._ Elder.] [Illustration: _Pl. 130._ Fruits of Guelder Rose.] [Illustration: _Pl. 131._ Flowers of Elder.] The Elder (_Sambucus nigra_). [Illustration: Elder. A, berries; B, portion of flower-cluster.] The Elder is more a tree of the wayside than of the woodland, often of low bushy growth; but where it finds good loamy soil with abundant moisture it attains a height of twenty feet. None of our trees grows more rapidly in its earliest years, and any bit of its living wood will readily take root, so that its presence in the hedge is often due to planting for the purpose of rapidly erecting a live screen. Its quickly grown juicy shoots soon harden into a tube of tough wood with a core of pith which is readily extracted, and renders the tube available for a peashooter, a pop-gun, or a music-pipe. Such uses have been known from remote antiquity--probably one might say from the beginnings of the human race. The ancient Greeks called it _Samb['u]ke_, from its wood having been used in the making of musical instruments. In the north of Britain it is known as Bourtree, Bore-tree, or Bottery, from the ease with which this clearing out of the pith is effected, and it is pretty clear that the more general name of Elder also has relation to the tubular shoots. Piers Plowman calls the tree Eller, a name that survives in Kent, Sussex, Lincoln, East Yorks, and Cheshire. This word, according to Prior, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon _eller_ and _ellarn_, and seems to mean "kindler"--"a name which we may suppose that it acquired from its hollow branches being used, like the bamboo in the tropics, to blow up a fire." It is thus probable that the housewife got her bellows, the musician his pipe, and the schoolboy his pop-gun, all from the same source.