WILD FLOWERS. 



ing in the island. Their conquerors, with uplifted 

 axe, proposed to spare their lives, and even to give 

 them safe passage to their own land, if they would 

 instruct them in the carefully guarded secret of 

 brewing the heather-ale. For some time neither 

 threat nor promise could avail, or extort the sacred 

 mystery; after a time, however, the father con- 

 sented, only demanding that his children should be 

 put to death before he made it known, lest on reach- 

 ing their native country they should betray what 

 he had done, and so cause him to be deprived of life. 

 Despising, perhaps, in their hearts his cowardice, 

 the Irish chiefs obeyed his behest, and killed the 

 two sons ; upon which the father exclaimed, with 

 triumph in his voice, "Fools! I saw that your 

 threats and promises were beginning to influence 

 my sons, for they were but boys, and might have 

 yielded; but now our secret is safe, for neither 

 can have effect on me I" In another moment this 

 martyr of an insufficient cause was hewn in pieces, 

 and thus it happened that the mystery remained un- 

 revealed, though we must suppose it to be still lurk- 

 ing, in cherished secresy, in its native Denmark; 

 lurking, perhaps, amidst the by-ways of that vast 

 heath, or heather-tract, which forms an object of so 

 much interest in the study of the distribution of 

 plants ; stretching with greater or less interruptions, 

 from the extreme point of Jutland down to latitude 

 52 on the south, and westward to the ocean, and 

 and eastward over a great part of Northern Ger- 

 many. The tale of the surviving son has, in reality, 

 a Scandinavian origin, being thus given in the 



