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Rh rather than interrupted by the bees plying their sounding wings, existed no longer. Every branch was musical with birds, whose perpetual chirpings served as chorus to the rich and prolonged cadences of the blackbird; while the least stir not of their own making filled the air with fluttering pinions, which let in a shower of sunshine through the leaves.

One characteristic of the New Forest is its freedom from underwood; hence the height of the stately trees is undiminished, and the sweep of the open place unbroken. Architecture, the first of sciences, took, in our northern world, its earlier lessons in the forest—the Gothic aisle and arch were found amid the beech and oak. The foliage was in the utmost variety of expanded spring; the leaves of the beech, though destined to a deeper shade, wore already their polished green; but the oak had yet put forth little more than those pale primrose-tinted buds, the faint promise of its future spreading shade. Here and there a shining holly reared its fairy "clump of spears," and round many a leafless trunk the slender English ivy twined its graceful wreaths in such profusion as to mimic the tree on whose life it had fed. But the beauty of the glades was the hawthorn, in full luxuriance. The