songster of the wood, the aberdevine. The sap of the birch makes the birch-wine of English housewifery, of which those who know how to make it are not a little proud :

"And though she boasts no charms divine,

Yet she can make and serve birch-wine."

WARTON.

It will flourish in English woods, and there is not a wood worth rambling in which has not many of these light, fairy creatures, pencilling the sky with their trembling, spidery network of leaves and branches. It was this same birch from which the Gauls extracted bitumen, and which the Russians now use to prepare the celebrated Russian leather; which the carpenter finds best of all wood for rafters, ploughs, spades, and carts; which the Highland peasants use for harness, ropes, and basket-work, and with which they symbolize, under the name of Betu or am beatha, the clan of the Buchanans. It is the same birch as that from which our poor imbecile stump was cut, which forms the great forests of the North; which climbs up rugged mountain-sides, to peep over the precipices, and fling the light of vegetable grace and beauty over the giant solitudes of snow. It is the same birch which fills us with forest lore when we see its silvery stem towering up, straight as an arrow, to the sky, and waving its plumes of pensile beauty in the sunlight.

The bonny broom,*

BROOM-A. S. brom; Ger. besen; D. beren, from D. bremmen, because the seeds when ripe, burst from the pods with considerable noise. Ital. scope garnate; Sp. escobas; Rus, metlii.

"Yellow and bright as bullion unalloyed,

Her blossoms ".

used by the good housewives of old to brush the crumbs from the dressing-board, and the soiled sand from the kitchen floor, is no less dear for its touches of memory, and pictures of green imagery, than the lady-birch. It grows on the moorland, where there is no shelter from the blast of winter or the fierce heat of summer; where drought, and swamp, and keenest frost have each unmitigated vigour, and where the earth lies flat beneath the blue sky, as if it had fallen prostrate, and had no friend but the broom to cover it with garments. It is on the dreary waste where the red deer loves to wander, and the ptarmigan finds a home, that the bonny broom sprinkles its round tufts of green, fresh as infancy amid the fiercest frost-golden as day-break through the laughing summer. There it creeps up and down the hills, and amid the wild forest dells, far away from the haunts of men, in company of creeping things, of gaps of sunshine, and of passing shadows.

"There lacked no floure to my dome,

Ne not so much as floure of brome."

CHAUCER.

"In yonder greenwood blows the broom;

Shepherds, we'll trust our flocks to stray,

Court Nature in her sweetest bloom,

And steal from Care one summer day."*

It was the rushy branches of the broom which sup

* Langhorne, "The Wilding and the Broom."

plied the old Greeks with ropes and cordage; * which now provides the "simple sheep" with the best of food, the cattle with the best of litter, the cottager with the best of thatch

(He made carpenters to make the houses and lodgynges of great tymbre, and set the houses like stretes, and covered them with rede and brome, so that it was lyke a lyttel towne.FROISSART.)

and the wild bee with the most delicious honey. It is the bonny broom which serves us as well whether we cut its tufts for sweeping, for tanning leather, or for the manufacture of coarse cloth; which is almost as useful as hops in brewing; which furnishes a wood capable of the most exquisite polish; which, in its ashes, gives a pure alkali, and in its pods and blossoms, perfume and medicine. Dr. Cullen and Mead both esteemed the broom in cases of dropsy.

"E'en humble broom and osiers have their use,

And shade for sheep and food for flocks produce."

It was the bonny broom which the Scottish clan of the Forbes wore in their bonnets when they wished. to arouse the heroism of their chieftains, and which, in their Gaelic dialect, they called bealadh, in token of its beauty. It was this very broom from which the long line of Plantagenets took their name, and which to the last they wore on their helmets, crests, and family seal. It was thus:-Fulke, Earl of Anjou, having committed a crime, was enjoined by a holy father of the church,

* Spartium, from sтаρтov, cordage. Genista spartium has thickset rush-like twigs, very tough and fibrous.

to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land by way of penance. He went, habited in lowly attire, with a sprig of broom in his hat to denote his humility. The expiation finished, he adopted the name of Plantagenet, from Planta and Genista,* the old name of the broom, and transmitted this to his princely descendants.† As an emblem of humility, too, it was worn by St. Louis, in 1234, on the occasion of his marriage with Margaret, eldest daughter of Raymond Berengarius, Count of Provence, and a new order of knights was instituted to commemorate the event. The motto of the order was "Exaltat humiles," and the collar of the order was made up of the flowers and seed-pods of the common broom, enamelled and intermixed with fleur-de-lys of gold. This Ordre de la Geneste, or Order of the Broom, continued till the death of Charles the Fifth.

"Though the feeblest thing that nature forms,
A frail and perishing flower art thou;

Yet thy race has survived a thousand storms
That have laid the monarch and warrior low.

The storied urn may be crumbled to dust,

And Time may the marble bust deface;

But thou wilt be faithful and firm to thy trust,-
The memorial-flower of a princely race.

Then hail to thee, fair Broomstick! herald of a thousand years, memorial of human trials, triumphs, and sufferings. Abide with us, oh! tough and well-tried

* GENISTA.-The Celt implies small bush; or from genu, a knee, from the bending of the twigs; or geno, to produce, on account of its abundance.

+ Sandford's "Genealogical History."

friend; and now, too feeble for thy office of cleanliness, hint to us of the old Roman pageant, when the noblesse of Rome assembled, and the officers swept the hall with a green broom affixed to a sturdy broomstick. That was the honour paid by Roman patricians to intellect, energy, and virtue, which, however humble in their origin, had an equal chance with wealth and ancestral title in sharing the offices and honours of the state. The broom was as conscious of its dignity as the newly-elected councillors just lifted from the ranks of the people; and the moment its green and flowerless branches touched the floor of the assembly, it broke into golden blossoms, a mute symbol of the fertility of virtue.* Hail to thee! for all the legends of old Time thou bringest us, from the state processions of Rome down to the hanging of a broom at the door of a Russian maiden pining for a lover. The broomstick was the chosen Pegasus of the midnight hags, when, gliding like bats through the midnight, they laid plots and counterplots to involve poor human nature in the sufferings of superstition :

"Do not strange matrons mount on high,

And switch their broomsticks through the sky,-
Ride post o'er hills, and woods, and seas,

From Thule to the Hesperides: +

Verily they do; but they are only the embodied sins of men's consciences, which have taken shape and come

This story is related by Marcellinus Ammianus. The custom of publicly sweeping the hall on occasion of those assemblies was maintained for a long period. The verbena and sagmina were carried by the Roman fetiales instead of the caduceus, as emblems of peace.

+ Somerville, "Epistle to Allan Ramsay."