236 SUMMER 



delight in the tops of old crumbling walls. They are heavy 

 plants, growing in thick mats, and cannot easily find a foot- 

 hold on the perpendicular faces, as the toad-flax does. Both 

 give a sense of jewelled coolness to the wild wall-garden 

 under the sun ; the starry yellow blossoms do not faint from 

 the sunshine, but flash it back, and the white stonecrop 

 has a snowy coolness. Yet for all the store of water in 

 their oozy leaves they cannot endure too great heat, and 

 perish suddenly in an exceptionally fierce July. Their 

 cool green rugs draping the stones change in a very few 

 days to the hot russet that we know in the first-fallen 

 leaves of the limes the unwholesome and unwelcome hue 

 of vegetation not failing in its natural decline, but burnt up 

 prematurely. 



These sun-kissed wall-gardens make a strong contrast in 

 the summer heats with the verdant but almost blossomless 

 rock-arches where trickling perennial drops nurture a vegeta- 

 tion exempt from winter, frost, and summer sun. Here, too, 

 as in the drier wall-gardens, there is a fairylike touch a 

 sense of something stranger, if hardly more exquisite, than 

 resides in our normal roses and violets. In these wet wall- 

 gardens the touch of strangeness is given by the preponder- 

 ance of the strange old cryptogamous plants the ferns and 

 liverworts and mosses over the blossoming plants that seem 

 to look frankly at one, and to belong to an earth which 

 knows man. These scaly liverworts seem alien survivals in 

 the human epoch ; they seem cognate with the giant lizards, 

 and even to-day beneath the lowest bulge of their green 

 scales there will peer up the spotted throat of the eft. Yet 

 the film of uncanniness in such spots is thin and dream- 

 like ; it does not mar the essential delicacy of their beauty, 

 or stain the purity and coolness of the falling water and 

 the air. Fern-seed is proverbially magic stuff, and in these 



