WAYSIDE PLANTS. 241 



suddenly emerge on a great slippery rock, where there 

 are only a few tufts of thrift to hold on by, and the 

 beach yawning some thirty feet below. 



But we are not going down to-day. And so, we 

 saunter on our narrow path, now up, now down ; now 

 in the sun, now in the shade ; now beneath an over- 

 hanging block of cold rock, where water drips, and 

 where the stonecrop and the navelwort grow, and the 

 many-fingered polypody creeps about ; and now under 

 arches of foliage, a greenwood shade, where the sun- 

 ray is reflected from a thousand dancing leaves. For 

 the young trees are meeting and intertwining over 

 our head; the hawthorn white with blossom, and 

 filling the air with its fragrance ; the sloe, the maple, 

 and the guelder-rose with its snowballs, and the 

 pointed heart-leaves of the bryony, so elegant in shape 

 and so glossy in surface, hanging over every bush, as 

 its long twining stems creep about like a network of 

 living cords, a wild drapery of verdure. 



The margins of our narrow footpath, too, are re- 

 freshing to the eye. Coarse grass half hides the 

 rough stone; the pale primrose is everywhere; the 

 dog-violet, pretty, but, alas I inodorous, peeps up in 

 companionship with it ; thousands of white stars, like 

 the constellations of a winter's night, mark where the 

 stitchwort sprawls ; the bright crimson blossom of 

 the rose-campion, and the paler ones of the herb- 

 Kobert attract the eye; hundreds of the greenish- 

 yellow umbels of the wood-spurge give a conspicuous 

 character to the vegetation, and even the dog's-mer- 



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