XXXVIII. 



THE WEEDS OF BEDMOOR. 



Our on the red moor here the sea-breeze blows wet 

 and misty, and the brine may almost be tasted in the 

 fine spray that floats around us, covering the low strag- 

 gling vegetation of the salt marsh with a thin film of 

 incrusting crystals. For there are moors and moors in 

 England ; and this particular Bedmoor by no means 

 fulfils the prior expectations that might be formed of it 

 from its high-sounding name. To our early English an- 

 cestors, in fact, a moor meant almost any tract of wild or 

 uninclosed ground ill fitted by nature for human habita- 

 tion or tillage. It was as indefinite and as expansive in 

 sense as the Australian word "bush," or the Norman 

 equivalent " forest." So in Yorkshire a moor means a 

 high stretch of undulating heath-covered rock ; whereas 

 in Somerset it means a low flat level of former marsh- 

 land, reclaimed and drained by means of numerous 

 "rhines" as local farmers still call them, with fond 

 clinging to an old Celtic common name, which has else- 

 where grown into the specific Teutonic title of the most 

 German among European rivers. Bedmoor belongs 

 rather to the latter type : a little triangular patch of 

 Dorset coast swamp, cut off from the sea by a narrow 

 belt of coarse shingle, and intersected by numerous tidal 

 ditches, with occasional flat expansions of fathomless 

 muddy ooze. It is not a beautiful place, truly, in its 

 main features ; and yet it revels in a wealth of color that 

 a painter dare hardly imitate, and a profusion of ihinutte 



