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Updated: May 8, 2025
I am not going to tell you the story, which was about a poor boy who received from a fairy to whom he had shown some kindness the gift of a marvelous wand, in the shape of a common blackthorn walking-stick, which nobody could suspect of possessing such wonderful virtue.
This great hawthorn has a twisted stem; the wood winds round itself in a spiral. The bole of a beech in the sunshine h spotted like a trout by the separate shadows of its first young leaves. Tall bushes almost trees of blackthorn are in full white flower; the dark, leafless boughs make it appear the whiter.
I climbed on to the front seat of the buggy beside my escort, he whipped the horses a cloud of dust, a whirr of wheels, and we were gone gone from Caddagat! We crossed the singing stream: on either bank great bushes of blackthorn last native flower of the season put forth their wealth of magnificent creamy bloom, its rich perfume floating far on the hot summer air.
'Yes, said Harold, 'I'd better have told him of that when I was about it; don't you think so, Nelly? 'If you go on at this rate, said Ellen, teased into anger, 'you'll be robbing the post-office yourself some day. 'Ay! and I'll get Paul Blackthorn to help me, said the boy. 'Come, Ellen, don't be so foolish; I tell you he's every bit as honest as I am, I'd go bail for him.
Nor was this all: for some rags of the man's dress, torn off by his headlong fall, still fluttered on a stump of blackthorn not thirty feet below. And now, again, the poor boy's heart quailed with an uncontrollable emotion of physical and mental fear.
When "Les Miserables" first appeared some literary Columbus made the remarkable discovery that it was a French book, that it was shot full of "slang," the expressive patois of the race, that it was liberally spiced with argot, the vernacular of vagabonds. Hugo's immortal masterpiece has not yet recovered from this discovery the thousandth ewe lamb is still blithely saltating over the blackthorn.
If any one had gone round the fields on old May-day, the 13th, his May-day, they might have found the deep blue bird's-eye veronica, anemones, star-like stitchworts, cowslips, buttercups, lesser celandine, daisies, white blackthorn, and gorse in bloom in short, a list enough to make a page bright with colour, though the wind might be bitter.
"The swallows are gone," I said; "the wild geese will soon be here," and I remembered their doleful cry as I scrambled under some blackthorn bushes, glad to get out of the wood into the fields. Though I knew the field I was in well, I didn't remember the young sycamores growing in one corner of it.
There were ancient oaks there, descended by less than four tree-generations from Druid times; all down the long drive the great elms threw their boughs skywards; there the solemn beeches grew, the gentler ash, and the lime; there the yews spread out their branches, and here and there the cedar of Lebanon, patriarch of all trees that bear cones, reared his royal crown above the rest; in and out, too, amongst the great boulders that strewed the park, the sharp-leaved holly stood out boldly, and the exquisite white thorn, all in flower, shot up to three and four times a man's height; below, the heather grew close and green to blossom in the summer-time; and in the deeper, lonelier places the blackthorn and hoe ran wild, and the dog-rose in wild confusion; the alder and the gorse too, the honeysuckle and ivy, climbed up over rocks and stems; you might see a laurel now and then, and bilberry bushes by thousands, and bracken everywhere in an endless profusion of rich, dark-green lace.
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