The gorse bushes hung from the sides, thrusting out their prickly sprays covered with orange and yellow blossom and encroached all they could; the heather sprouted and slowly crept here and there, in company with a lovely fine grass that would have made a lover of smooth lawns frantic with envy.

Over the heath, ling, and furze the dodder wreathed and wove its delicate tangle, and the thrift raised its lavender heads to nod with satisfaction at the way in which all the plants and wild shrubs were doing their work.
But there were two things which left all the rest behind, and did by far the most to bring the crooked lane back to beauty.

They laughed at the two brionies, black and white; for though they made a glorious show, with their convolvulus and deeply cut leaves, and sent forth strands of wonderfully rapid growth to run over the sturdy blackthorn, which produced such splendid sloes, and then hung down festoons of glossy leaves into the lane that quite put the more slow-growing ivy to the blush, still these lovely trailing festoons died back in the winter, while their rival growths kept on.

These rivals were the brambles and the wild clematis, which grew and grew in friendly emulation, and ended, in spite of many rebuffs from trampling feet, by shaking hands across the road; the clematis, not content with that, going farther and embracing and tangling themselves up till rudely broken apart by the passers-by--notably by old Joe Daygo, when he went that way home to his solitary cot, instead of walking, out of sheer awkwardness, across somebody's field or patch.
"I wish father would buy old Joe's cottage," said Vince, as the two lads trudged down the lane that afternoon.

"We could make it such a lovely place." "Yours is right enough," said Mike, pausing in whistling an old French air a good deal affected by the people.
"Oh yes, and I shouldn't like to leave it; but I always like this bit down here; the lane is so jolly.