44 NATURE IN DOWNLAND 



A second even more barren spot, a couple of miles 

 from the one described, was, so far as my experience 

 goes, absolutely unique in character, and as simple and 

 chaste in its one beautiful colour as the other was 

 rich and varied with its sprinkling of half a hundred 

 colours. Walking on the long plateau-like top of the 

 high down I saw before me a perfectly white piece 

 of ground, an area of about twelve to fourteen acres, 

 and concluded that it was an old ploughed field over- 

 grown with white campion; but on arriving at the 

 place I found that my sheet of white blossoms was 

 nothing but a field thickly strewn with white flints. 

 It is often said, and it is perhaps true, that the flints 

 of the chalk downs after exposure to the air become 

 whiter than any other flints; and these were white 

 indeed white as white blossoms in summer, and as 

 a field covered with snow in winter. That any spot 

 with so thin a soil, where the blanket or matting of 

 the turf must have rested on a bed of flinty chalk, 

 had been thought worth cultivating was something 

 to wonder at. Now, until I was within twenty or 

 thirty yards of this stony field, where it touched the 

 green turf, it appeared absolutely without any plant 

 life, but at that short distance I found that it was 

 overgrown with forget-me-not, a plant that, like the 

 pimpernel, is always found on waste stony or barren 

 places on the downs where the turf has been destroyed. 

 But in most places it grows among other plants : here 

 it had the whole field to itself, and grew to a height 



