mushrooms--the true mushrooms with salmon gills grew nearer the warren;
the slope towards the nut-tree hedge and spring. Several climates in one
field: the wintry ridge over which leaves were always driving in all four
seasons of the year; the level sunny plain and fallen cromlech still tall
enough for a gnomon and to cast its shadow in the treeless drought; the
moist, warm, grassy depression; the lotus-grown slope, warm and dry.

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and
then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you
will find a change in the air, the feeling, and tone of the place. It is
close by, but it is not the same. To discover these minute differences,
which make one locality healthy and home happy, and the next adjoining
unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying
about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is
something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.
Superstition having made the discovery, science composes a lecture on the
reason why, and claims the credit. Bird's-foot lotus means a fortunate
spot, dry, warm--so far as soil is concerned. If you were going to live
out of doors, you might safely build your kibitka where you found it.
Wandering with the pictured flower-book, just purchased, over the windy
ridge where last year's skeleton leaves, blown out from the alder copse
below, came on with grasshopper motion--lifted and laid down by the wind,
lifted and laid down--I sat on the sward of the sheltered slope, and
instantly recognised the orange-red claws of the flower beside me. That
was the first; and this very morning, I dread to consider how many years
afterwards, I found a plant on a wall which I do not know. I shall have
to trace out its genealogy and emblazon its shield. So many years and
still only at the beginning--the beginning, too, of the beginning--for
as yet I have not thought of the garden or conservatory flowers (which
are wild flowers somewhere), or of the tropics, or the prairies.