THE MOUNTAIN BOG 227 
still they flaunted their splendour unconquered, and made 
that small wet dell a brilliant basin of blue. Alas! I 
would that such persistence, such generosity, would mark 
Gentiana bavarica in England. Give it the choicest place 
in your choicest bog, nurse it up with silver sand and finest 
mixtures. But it will seldom be permanent. Perhaps we 
cannot give it rigours enough of climate—not sufficient 
sternness at one moment of the year, and enough con- 
tinuous encouragement at the other. 
Now the stream has reached the plainland of the last 
huts, the summer station of the cattle and their keepers. 
Here is a little meadow, perfectly flat and smiling, through 
which runs a placid brook as through many an English 
lowland. Its banks are dense with common nettle and 
blue Monkshood, thanks to the corrupting occupancy of 
man, who, wherever he may go across the world, takes 
with him all his weeds—moral, no less than vegetable, to 
thrive abominably and wax gross in virgin soil. Beyond 
the wooden huts lies a colony of boulders by the water- 
side, fallen from the slope above, which rises starkly 
overhead towards the moraine. On these huge rocks are 
found earnests of the promise above us— Senecio Doroni- 
cum, Primulas, a few stray plants of Asplenium septen- 
trionale and Lloydia serotina. 'These are both natives, 
but rarissimi, of North Wales. The fern is a strange, 
wee thing, linear-leaved, forked like a serpent’s tongue ; 
the Spider’s-wort, from its tiny bulb, emits a few thread- 
like leaves and then a dull white blossom like a star. I 
quested for it once among the dark rocks in the Devil’s 
Kitchen above Llyn Idwal. No place has ever so 
daunted me ; on all sides black, awful precipices dropped 
towards a black, unsmiling little lake far down at their 
heart; clouds, gloom, and storm made the inhabitants of 
that dreadful world. Timidly and abjectly I hunted the 
Lloydia, frail pale Princess of so grim a keep. ‘The 
