The whitethorn is very late this year, and we found ourselves in the full glory of it. It is beautiful in all its stages, from the time when it first opens its buds, to the season when 'every spray is white with may, and blooms the eglantine.' There is no hint of green leaf visible then, and every tree is 'as white as snow of one night.' This is the Gaelic comparison, and the first snow seems especially white and dazzling, I suppose, when one sees it in the morning where were green fields the night before. The sloe, which is the blackthorn, comes still earlier and has fewer leaves. That is the tree of the old English song:--'From the white-blossomed sloe My dear Chloe requested A sprig her fair breast to adorn.
"No, by Heav'ns!" I exclaimed, "may I perish, If ever I plant in that bosom a thorn!"'
And it is not only trees, but hedges and bushes and groves of hawthorn, for a white thorn bush is seldom if ever cut down here, lest a grieved and displeased fairy look up from the cloven trunk, and no Irishman could bear to meet the reproach of her eyes. Do not imagine, however, that we are all in white, like a bride: there is the pink hawthorn, and there are pink and white horse-chestnuts laden with flowers, yellow laburnums hanging over whitewashed farm- buildings, lilacs, and, most wonderful of all, the blaze of the yellow gorse. There will be a thorn hedge struggling with and conquering a grey stone wall; then a golden gorse bush struggling with and conquering the thorn; seeking the sun, it knows no restraints, and creeping through the barriers of green and white and grey, it fairly hurls its yellow splendours in great blazing patches along the wayside. In dazzling glory, in richness of colour, there is nothing in nature that we can compare with this loveliest and commonest of all wayside weeds. The gleaming wealth of the Klondike would make a poor showing beside a single Irish hedgerow; one would think that Mother Earth had stored in her bosom all the sunniest gleams of bygone summers, and was now giving them back to the sun king from whom she borrowed them.
It was at twilight when we first swam this fragrant, golden sea--twilight, and the birds were singing in every bush; the thrushes and blackbirds in the blossoming cherry and chestnut-trees were so many and so tuneful that the chorus was sweet and strong beyond anything I ever heard. There had been a shower or two, of course; showers that looked like shimmering curtains of silver gauze, and whether they lifted or fell the birds went on singing.
"I did not believe such a thing possible but it is lovelier than Pettybaw," said Francesca; and just here we came in sight of a pink cottage cuddling on the breast of a hill. Pink the cottage was, as if it had been hewed out of a coral branch or the heart of a salmon; pink-washed were the stone walls and posts; pink even were the chimneys; a green lattice over the front was the only leaf in the bouquet. Wallflowers grew against the pink stone walls, and there is no beautiful word in any beautiful language that can describe the effect of that modest, rose-hued dwelling blushing against a background of heather-brown hills covered solidly with golden gorse bushes in full bloom. Himself and I have always agreed to spend our anniversaries with Mrs. Bobby at Comfort Cottage, in England, or at Bide-a-Wee, the 'wee, theekit hoosie' in the loaning at Pettybaw, for our little love-story was begun in the one and carried on in the other; but this, this, I thought instantly, must somehow be crowded into the scheme of red-letter days. And now we suddenly discovered something at once interesting and disconcerting--an American flag floating from a tree in the background.
