292 WILD ROSES. CHAP. xvm. 



be considered native as Calluna imlgaris. . . . You will 

 please give all this news to Professor Balfour. Tell him 

 I am just as jealous of my rights as he can be himself. 



" I truly grant, a hundred times, 



My skeel may weel be doubted, 

 But facts are chiels that winna ding, 

 And needna be disputed." 



Another letter from the medical student follows, in 

 which he offered to assist Dick with specimens of plants ; 

 to which the baker, perhaps tired of the subject, said 

 " I hope you will dismiss from your mind the idea of 

 hunting out dried plants for me. Attend to your studies, 

 and leave me to find plants for 'mysel.' . . . Those 

 plants exist in Caithness some way. How can I tell 

 how they got there ? " 



The correspondence was not yet over. The student, 

 on his way home to the Orkneys, called upon Dick 

 again, made up all differences, and got from him some of 

 the wild Caithness roses, the whole of which Dick 

 had tracked to their lonely haunts among the hills and 

 the straths. In a subsequent letter, Dick says, " I could 

 pick three or four roses of different ' varieties ' from one 

 wild rose bush in various stages of transformation. I 

 don't consider myself beat on that point yet. Nor 

 will I rest satisfied until I get the decision of some 

 authority. I'll wait, even for twenty years. Spes 

 in/racta. What's that ? Gaelic ? May be so may be 

 no. It's all the same. I'll wait ! . . . Thanks to you 

 for giving me the Goat Honeysuckle, and the Woodsia 

 from Dumfriesshire. I'll thank you quietly ilka time I 



