8 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



tween ourselves and the plants. We underestimate their 

 unconscious intelligence and their guileless cunning ; we 

 forget that in their insentient fashion they plot and plan 

 and outwit one another with almost human semblance of 

 intentional strategy. Yet those of us who live much in 

 their society learn at last to recognize that there is a 

 meaning and a purpose in everything they do a use for 

 every little unnoticed point of structure or habit in their 

 divinely ordered economy. Even the very date of their 

 flowering has a settled purpose of its own, and bears 

 some definite reference to the insect that brings the pol- 

 len, or to the time needed for ripening and setting the 

 seed. To watch the succession of these little members 

 of the floral commonwealth, to learn the connection in 

 which they stand to one another, and to interpret the 

 purpose that they severally have in view these are the 

 great problems and the self-sufficing rewards of those 

 who slowly spell out for themselves from living hiero- 

 glyphics the emblems of the country calendar. 



See from the edge of the hillside here how the prim- 

 roses cling, as it were on purpose, to the tumble slopes 

 and banks of the Fore Acre, leaving almost flowerless 

 the level platforms of terrace between them. Each little 

 bank or escarpment is a perfect natural flower-bed, thick- 

 ly covered- from top to bottom with beautiful masses of 

 tufted yellow bloom. But in between, on the interme- 

 diate grassy bits, there are no primroses ; or, to speak 

 more correctly, all the primroses there are cowslips, 

 their tall scapes not yet much more than just raised 

 above the level of the greensward. For at bottom prim- 

 roses and cowslips are really identical : even the old- 

 fashioned botanists have freely allowed that much, and 

 have reunited the two varieties as a single species under 

 a common name. The leaves are absolutely indistinguisk- 



