AN ARCADIAN CALENDAR 



blossoms ; gales scatter its gold, but fresh blooms rapidly 

 succeed the fallen. The thick, leathery leaves are typical 

 of what botanists mean by glaucous : blue-grey, or sea- 

 green, they endure through Winter. The peculiar hue 

 gave the botanical name *' Glaucium," which possibly 

 enshrines the memory of the Boeotian fisherman who 

 turned into a sea-god. 



THE DOWNS SO FREE 



DAINTIEST of bell-flowers are the harebells, the blue- 

 bells of Scotland, now ringing their silent 

 August's chimes on the downs. They were ever 

 Bluebells favourites with poets ; Clare, the Northamp- 

 tonshire bard, spoke lovingly of these 

 " Little bell-flowers, pearly blue, that trembling peep." 

 Among other wild campanulas the nettle-leaved bell- 

 flower, throatwort of old, is abundant to-day in hillside 

 woods, the true original Canterbury bell. Most ex- 

 quisitely delicate is the ivy-leaved bell-flower, a fairy, 

 azure gem of mountain bogs, a lover of the spring which 

 loves the ravine haunted by the ring-ouzel, and those 

 water- sprites, the dipper and the grey wagtail. 



ON Juniper Hill, on the North Downs, the silvery- 

 green berries of its junipers now make a 

 The Gin goodly show, but it will be a year before 

 Tree they take on their blue-black hue; ripe 



berries among them are last year's crop. 

 Our juniper, though it may grow to be twenty feet 

 high, is not the Biblical shade-giving juniper, the name 

 having been given to a sort of broom of the wilderness. 

 A wealth of other lore clings about it, as that the 

 108 



