4 DEEP SANDSTONE LANES. 



boughs. In some spots the polypody, twisting and inter- 

 lacing its creeping scaly stem with the tough, half-exposed 

 roots of hazel, maple, oak and hawthorn, grows in such 

 luxuriance and profusion, that its gold-dotted fronds hang- 

 by thousands aye, hundreds of thousands over the 

 stumps and roots, forming the most graceful of coverings. 

 Here and there are great tufts of hart's-tongue, with its 

 bright, broad, shining, wavy leaves. Here and there, 

 where water has filtered through chinks in the sandstone, 

 so as to keep up a streak of moisture down the bank, we 

 have lady-fern and a host of mosses. Here and there, in 

 holes little cavernous recesses the face of the damp 

 sand or sandstone is powdered over with a diversity of 

 lichens. Here and there the lithe snake-like honeysuckle 

 twines round the straight upright young stems of the nut- 

 tree, cutting deeply into their substance, and forcing them 

 out of their stiff propriety into strange corkscrew forms : - 

 up it goes, and getting above the heads of its supporters, 

 spreads its own sweet laughing blossoms to the sun. Here 

 and there is a dense network of the wild clematis, clothed 

 with downy seeds a plant so loved by Scott, that, with a 

 poet's licence, he transplanted it from our warm hedgerows 

 to the cold rocky scenery of Ketturin and Venue, a bota- 

 nical blunder which few of his readers will detect and none 

 criticise severely. I love these lanes, because Nature has 

 so long had her own way in them ; and where Nature is 

 left to herself, she always acts wisely, beautifully and well. 

 There is not a foot of surface in these old hollow ways, but 

 has its peculiar charms. 



To lovers of birds such lanes have special attractions, 

 for they abound in those wild-briary thickets in which our 

 summer birds delight to hide themselves and to nestle. 



