splendid white blossoms that adorn the woods.  Its lateral branches are flat, like a fan, and dotted all over, with star-like blossoms, as large as those of the gum-cistus.  Another pretty shrub, of smaller size, is the poison alder.  It is well that its noxious qualities are very generally known, for it is most tempting to the eye by its delicate fringe-like bunches of white flowers.  Even the touch of this shrub is poisonous, and produces violent swelling.  The arbor judae is abundant in every wood, and its bright and delicate pink is the earliest harbinger of the American spring.  Azalias, white, yellow, and pink; kalmias of every variety, the too sweet magnolia, and the stately rhododendron, all grow in wild abundance there.  The plant known in England as the Virginian creeper, is often seen climbing to the top of the highest forest trees, and bearing a large trumpet-shaped blossom of a rich scarlet.  The sassafras is a beautiful shrub, and I cannot imagine why it has not been naturalized in England, for it has every appearance of being extremely hardy.  The leaves grow in tufts, and every tuft contains leaves of five or six different forms.  The fruit is singularly beautiful; it resembles in form a small acorn, and is jet black; the cup and stem looking as if they were made of red coral.  The graceful and fantastic grapevine is a feature of great beauty, and its wandering festoons bear no more resemblance to our well-trained vines, than our stunted azalias, and tiny magnolias, to their thriving American kindred.

There is another charm that haunts the summer wanderer in America, and it is perhaps the only one found in greatest perfection in the West:  but it is beautiful every where.  In a bright day, during any of the summer months, your walk is through an atmosphere of butterflies, so gaudy in hue, and so varied in form, that I often thought they looked like flowers on the wing.  Some of them are very large, measuring three or four inches across the wings; but many, and I think the most beautiful, are smaller than ours.  Some have wings of the most dainty lavender colour; and bodies of black; others are fawn and rose colour; and others again are orange and bright blue.  But pretty as they are, it is their number, even more than their beauty, that delights the eye.  Their gay and noiseless movement as they glance through the air, crossing each other in chequered maze, is very beautiful.  The humming-bird is another pretty summer toy; but they are not sufficiently numerous, nor do they live enough on the wing to render them so important a feature in the transatlantic show, as the rainbow-tinted butterflies.  The fire-fly was a far more brilliant novelty.  In moist situations, or before a storm, they are very numerous, and in the dark sultry evening of a burning day, when all employment was impossible, I have often found it a pastime to watch their glancing light, now here, now there; now seen, now gone; shooting past with the rapidity of lightning, and looking like a shower of falling stars, blown about in the breeze of evening.