5 U AIMER AND A UT UMN FL WERS 4 1 7 



ragged robin, red and white campions, purple 

 loosestrife, blue and white comfrey, meadow- 

 sweet, willow-herb, St. John's wort, and a host 

 of other flowers, follow each other in rapid suc- 

 cession, till all the meads are 'flowery vales.' 

 The hillsides are clothed with every shade of 

 softened green, here and there relieved by large 

 patches of crimson-hued trifolium and the pink- 

 flowered sainfoin. 



Too bright to last, and when at their brightest 

 and best, most of them doomed to fall under the 

 scythe. There they lie, dead and dying, in long 

 swathes, side by side sweet in their lives, and 

 even when dying * diffusing fragrance round.' 



With the hay-harvest, the fields grow gray till 

 the fresh grass springs again ; but in the meadows 

 the beauty of the year has gone. Scarlet poppies 

 and blue cockles come to deck the corn ; mullein 

 and toad-flax, bugloss and scabious, yarrow and 

 hawk's-bit, adorn the banks and hedgerows, and 

 here and there patches of wild mignonette wave 

 in the summer wind ; the thistles lengthen, bloom, 

 and fall away, strewing the ground with tufts of 

 softest down. The starlings are feasting merrily 

 on the purple berries of the elder-trees ; the long, 

 graceful clusters of the traveller's joy glisten green 

 and red in the sunlight, till, ripening, they turn to 

 old man's beard, from which the autumn dew- 

 drops hang like ' tears of sorrow ' shed for the 

 flowers of summer which have passed away. 



To the very few wild-flowers to which I have 



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