is not the single tinted green ribbon it lately was. The light of its
verdure has been dimmed by the light of flowers. The grass mounts
high, but not higher than the oxeye daisies, the blue racemes of
stachys, the mauve-coloured heads of scabious, the bladder-campions,
the yellow buttercups and goat's-beard. The oxeyes are so numberless
in one long reach of meadow that a white drapery, which every breeze
folds or unfolds, seems to have been cast as light as sea-foam upon
the illimitable forest of stems. The white butterflies that flutter
above are like flecks of foam on the wing. Elsewhere it is the blue of
the stachys and the spiked veronica that rules. Deeper in the herbage
other races of flowers shine in the fair groves of this grassy
paradise, and every blossom, however small, is a mystery, a miracle.
Here is the star of Bethlehem, wide open in the sunshine and showing
so purely white amidst the green, and yonder is the purple fringe-like
tuft of the weird muscari. Along the banks of the stream tall
lilac-purple, stock-like flowers rise proudly above the grasses. They
belong to the hesperis or dame's violet, a common wild-flower in this
valley. Upon my left is the abrupt stony slope of the gorge. Between
it and the meadow are shrubs of yellow jessamine starred with blossom.
But the stony steep that dazzles the eyes with the sun's reflected
glare has its flowers too. Nature, in her great passion for beauty,
even draws it out of the disintegrated fragments of time-worn rock,
whose banks would otherwise be as stark and dry as the desert sand.
Lightly as flakes of snow the frail blossoms of the white rock-rose
lie upon the stones. Then there are patches of candytuft running from
white into pink, crimson flowers of the little crane's-bill, and
spurges whose floral leaves are now losing their golden green and
taking a hue of fiery brown.

An open wood, chiefly of dwarf oak, and shrubs such as the wayfaring