296 



SUMMER 



where the blue sky is mirrored in a wide heath-pool, dotted 

 with cool white swans. 



Natural lagoons are common in the southern heaths, and 

 others, such as the Frensham ponds, have been formed by 

 damming little streams and drowning a tract of the waste. 

 The natural pools are formed by much the same agencies 

 that produce the peat. Both are caused by lack of drainage 

 in the soil ; and the acidity of the peat tends to cake together 

 a layer of the underlying sand, and so to 

 check drainage further, and cause more peat 

 and more pools. A characteristic bog flora 

 often flourishes about these marshy edges and 

 in the similar moist depressions on the moor. 

 Sundews trap flies with their hairy leaves, and 

 white cotton-grass flutters in the wind with its 

 unique suggestion of solitude and sterility. 

 Marsh-pennywort creeps by the threads of 

 water with its round green leaves, and bog 

 asphodel lifts its golden flower-spikes when the 

 heather blooms, leaving withered red stems to 

 mark its place on the winter moor. Both the 

 drier and the wetter parts of the heath are 

 haunted by snakes and lizards. Green snakes hunt frogs in 

 the wet tangle about the edge of the pools, where the air 

 lies warm and dank on summer days ; and adders and blind- 

 worms bask on the sand among the heather. Their cast 

 skins are found knotted among the heather-stems, in which 

 they entangle themselves so as more easily to twist free of the 

 old husk. The rare smooth snake our only poisonous species 

 besides the viper is also chiefly found on the southern 

 English heaths. Dry sunny slopes of the heath are the chief 

 haunt of the common lizard ; but we seldom catch it basking, 

 as we can the adder or blindworm. Small and defenceless 



GRASS SNAKE 



