io8 SUMMER 



the bird's-foot are straight, and three of them thus mimic a 

 bird's footprint, or the broad arrow, while those of the horse- 

 shoe vetch are sharply twisted and wrinkled, and often 

 curved into a horse-shoe. As the vetch is paler yellow than 

 the bird's-foot, so the ladies' fingers or kidney vetch is a 

 paler yellow again. It is another member of the great legu- 

 minous or pealike tribe, and looks much like an unusual 

 kind of clover. Each stem commonly bears two heads of 

 blossom, of which one expands just as the other fades. 

 Though it is a free-growing plant, there is the peculiar 

 distinction of the chalk flora in the contrast of its yellow 

 quills with the fine grey wool from which they spring, and 

 the graceful half-creeping stem. Yet another shade of 

 yellow is seen in the finely wrought clusters of the yellow 

 ladies' bed-straw, which foam under the midsummer sky like 

 a mass of bubbles blown by the frog-hopper from a grass 

 stem. It is sulphur yellow, with a tinge of green ; and a 

 companion bed-straw is white. Milkwort sprinkles the chalk 

 turf with flowers of many shades of purple, blue, and white, 

 and makes a pleasant contrast with the yellow blossoms. 



The two most delicate plants of the chalk turf are bur- 

 dened with two of the most clumsy names. They are the 

 cathartic flax and the squinancy wort. These names are 

 legacies from the old herbalists, who studied botany from a 

 directly practical standpoint. The cathartic or purging flax 

 is the branching hairlike plant with little white blossoms 

 which lifts itself everywhere to its full stature of about three 

 inches in the shelter of the downland hay. It is a rigid little 

 plant, full of a miniature precision ; and more graceful and 

 no less curious is the squinancy wort, which is also found in 

 almost every square foot of typical downland turf. It creeps 

 about the turf with clusters of minute pink blossoms, like 

 flakes of melting foam. Our inquiring ancestors discovered 



