Country Life
THE CHRISTMAS LANDSCAPE.
The Christmas landscape is hung with a great wealth of berries ; and by some trick of the season holly leaves have grown more thinly than usual and the berries more brightly. No other berries are quite so tough on the stalk, and few so slow in maturing, so that they are seldom ravaged by the birds till Christmas is well over. This year even the tenderer, softer or more luscious berries remain. One has seldom seen the hedges quite so freely festooned with the black bryony (often quite wrongly called by countrymen the deadly night- shade). Not a single fieldfare has yet attacked our thorntrees and the thrushes have been sparing of the briars. All this, with a certain mildness in pm-Christmas weather, has multi- plied the sentimental prophecies that a hard winter is to come.
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