THE LAP OF PROSERPINE 129 



I shall look closer, and find that evidence of hard 

 work well done now throngs the bending spray and fills 

 each little seed-cup. 



Late August is the hour of the yellow composite 

 blossoms, but it needs a botanist to distinguish you 

 the hawkbit and hawkbeard and hawkweed folk from 

 one another and from many more of the dandelion- 

 flowered clans. Only the mouse-ear hawkweed one 

 may easily recognise by his crimson-streaked bud and 

 lemon bloom ; and the wall-lettuce's spray of little 

 flowers is also distinctive, while the ox-tongue's huge 

 habit and prickly foliage mark him as a personage 

 apart. Fragrant ploughman's spikenard now rises, 

 and of lesser things the rosy wild basil is fair to 

 see ; its congener, the aromatic calamint, blossoms 

 in pale purple beside it ; and in an old wall or 

 upon some stony spot, such as the thyme loves, 

 the exquisite violet of the little basil thyme shall 

 possibly be found. Of wall -lovers, indeed, one might 

 furnish a goodly list, and some I name presently 

 when treating of the moorland ways. As for the 

 deep lanes, when artificial stonework banks up an 

 earth-slip or fills a gap, ivy-leaved toad-flax and 

 pellitory of the wall soon find it ; seeds of many 

 things fly hither on their little parachutes, and 

 Devon's only saxifrage, the tiny rue-leaved variety, 

 may grace the spot in springtime, with his minute 

 but ruddy and cheerful presence. 



During September Nature begins to reckon up her 

 harvest, much of which has already returned into the 

 K 



