AMONGST THE HEATHER. 37 



flinging their red and purple jewels over Nature's desolations, 

 and as the long summer days die out, rustling their sere and 

 withered flowers (which remain on the plant even when dead, 

 and form the chief characteristic of the family in a botanist's 

 eyes) among snow and wet, determined to do their best to 

 cheer the waste places of the earth. The autumnal holiday- 

 maker never fails to greet the heath as the symbol of all that 

 is free and pleasurable in outdoor life, while to the inmates of 

 the Scotch shieling heather stands in much the same relation 

 for its economic uses as does the bamboo to the Gond or 

 Malay. Even the gipsy and the tramp have reason to bless 

 heather, as it helps them to a livelihood by making brooms, if 

 only they can obtain or take right of common where it grows. 

 And to many a mountain child the purple hillside is the only 

 flower garden he knows ; but what a garden ! Reaching from 

 horizon to horizon, itself the best of bedding-plants, requiring 

 no care or expenditure, the greener after the worst of storms, 

 when August's sun blazes most fiercely only more purple and 

 luxuriant, the home of all that is elevated and purifying in 

 heart and taste. For " it is not the written poetry which affects 

 us most, but the unwritten poetry of our own youth, and mine 

 is all bound up with heather, and fern, and streams flowing 

 under the shade of alders." * 



Not only are there many different species of heather, but 

 despite the apparent uniformity of the common kinds when 

 covering a moorland, the keen eye may discover differences in the 

 texture and colour of the flowery carpet, which the dull wight, 

 his vision unpurged by euphrasy and rue, thoughtlessly misses. 

 Mark this grey scaur falling eighty feet from the pure blue 

 skies overhead into the blackest pool of the Tummel, but 

 fringed above with the deepest of purple heather, which lovingly 

 runs as far down its face as the longest spray can find foothold. 

 No wonder that an artist is painting the scene from his umbrella- 

 * P. G. Hamerton, Round my House, p. 54- 



