The Clans grass in hollows and combes and along watered 

 of the meadows in June, often dark as pine-green or 

 as sunlit jade, and in shadowy places or in 

 twilight sometimes as lustrously sombre-green 

 as the obsidian, that precious stone of the 

 Caucasus now no longer a rarity among us. 

 How swiftly, too, that changes after the heats 

 of midsummer, often being threaded with grey 

 light before the dog-days are spent. More- 

 over, at any season there is a difference between 

 down-grass and mountain-grass, between sea- 

 grass and valley-grass, between moor-grass and 

 wood-grass. It may be slight, and not in 

 kind but only in shadowy dissemblances of 

 texture and hue ; still one may note the 

 difference. More obvious, of course, is the 

 difference between, say, April -grass and the 

 same grass when May or June suffuses it with 

 the red glow of the seeding sorrel, or between 

 the sea-grass that has had the salt wind upon 

 it since its birth, the bent as it is commonly 

 called, and its brother among the scarps and 

 cliff-edges of the hills, so marvellously soft and 

 hairlike for all that it is not long since the 

 snows have lifted or since sleet and hail have 

 harried the worn faces of boulder and crag. 

 Or, again, between even the most delicate 

 wantonness of the seeding hay, fragrant with 

 white clover and purple vetch, and the light 



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