and ornaments of a tribe of ancient Britons.  One cannot strike a spade into the earth, in Great Britain, without a fair chance of some surprise in the form of a Saxon coin, or a Celtic implement, or a Roman fibula.  Nobody expects any such pleasing surprise in a New England field.  One must be content with an Indian arrowhead or two, now and then a pestle and mortar, or a stone pipe.  A top dressing of antiquity is all he can look for.  The soil is not humanized enough to be interesting; whereas in England so much of it has been trodden by human feet, built on in the form of human habitations, nay, has been itself a part of preceding generations of human beings, that it is in a kind of dumb sympathy with those who tread its turf.  Perhaps it is not literally true that

  One half her soil has walked the rest
  In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages;

but so many of all these lie within it that the whole mother island is a campo santo to all who can claim the same blood as that which runs in the veins of her unweaned children.

The flora and fauna of a country, as seen from railroad trains and carriages, are not likely to be very accurately or exhaustively studied.  I spoke of the trees I noticed between Chester and London somewhat slightingly.  But I did not form any hasty opinions from what happened to catch my eye.  Afterwards, in the oaks and elms of Windsor Park, in the elms of Cambridge and Oxford and Salisbury, in the lindens of Stratford, in the various noble trees, including the cedar of Lebanon, in which Tennyson very justly felt a pride as their owner, I saw enough to make me glad that I had not uttered any rash generalizations on the strength of my first glance.  The most interesting comparison I made was between the New England and the Old England elms.  It is not necessary to cross the ocean to do this, as we have both varieties growing side by side in our parks,—­on Boston Common, for instance.  It is wonderful to note how people will lie about big trees.  There must be as many as a dozen trees, each of which calls itself the “largest elm in New England.”  In my younger days, when I never travelled without a measuring-tape in my pocket, it amused me to see how meek one of the great swaggering elms would look when it saw the fatal measure begin to unreel itself.  It seemed to me that the leaves actually trembled as the inexorable band encircled the trunk in the smallest place it could find, which is the only safe rule.  The English elm (Ulmus campestris) as we see it in Boston comes out a little earlier perhaps, than our own, but the difference is slight.  It holds its leaves long after our elms are bare.  It grows upward, with abundant dark foliage, while ours spreads, sometimes a hundred and twenty feet, and often droops like a weeping willow.  The English elm looks like a much more robust tree than ours, yet they tell me it is very fragile, and that its limbs are constantly breaking off in high winds, just as happens with our