DIGITALIS PURPUREA. (Foxglove,) 



•' An empty sky — a world of heather 



Purple of Foxglove— yellow of broom." 



--Jean Inglow. 



"nIHUS the gifted poetess quaintly but 

 truthfully paints the moorlands in 

 many parts of the Motherland — No 

 tree to brink the sky line — the beau- 

 tiful heather everywhere, only broken here and 

 there, by patches of the yellow broom. It 

 is there that the stately Foxglove, the subject of 

 this brief sketch, is found and seen to advan- 

 tage, standing as upright as a sentry on guard, 

 in gorgeous uniform, perhaps in the shelter of a 

 broom or gorse bush or surrounding some 

 huge granite boulder, sometimes gently swaying 

 in the sweet breezes wafted over the heath, 

 vocal with the hum of bees, and laden with 

 the fragrance of the moorland flowers. It was 

 in the shadow of a large rock not far from Dun- 

 sinane Hill, where Macbeth's castle of historic 

 fame stood, that I made my first acquaintance 

 with the foxglove. Years afterwards I found 

 the descendants of the same sentries keeping 

 watch over the same rock, reminding one of 

 the customs of times gone by, when certain 



Fig 1457.— a Foxglove. 

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