AMONGST THE HEATHER. 39 



have left their bones in every clime, and everywhere stamped 

 the impress of their stern patriotism and unbending persever- 

 ance. Devon has been the nursery of knights-errant Scot- 

 land the stern mother of heroes. 



Hants's heather, again, as seen on the North Downs, is uni- 

 formerly of a soberer tint than that of either Devon or Scotland. 

 There is little admixture of other flowers, nothing to serve as 

 foil to its amethystine glow. We look up to the man who is 

 inflexibly virtuous, and respect him who is unswervingly accurate 

 in his disposition of time ; but love seldom gathers round them, 

 because kindly inconsistencies and the amiable failings so dear 

 to ordinary human natures are unknown to them. So the 

 heart finds it difficult to attach itself to the unalloyed heather 

 of Hants. It is different with Lincolnshire, where scanty 

 patches of the plant occasionally linger, pleasing oases to the 

 artistic eye amongst the vast desert of skilled farming, the 

 formal acres of turnips and mangolds threatening ere long to 

 swallow up these purple outliers, which indeed are at present 

 only permitted to exist on sufferance. The very rarity of these 

 scattered banks of heather renders them precious. The be- 

 holder blesses them (if he be not a farmer), on account of 

 their associations with Northern sport and beauty, freedom from 

 cares, and a thousand other sentiments which break in accept- 

 ably on the anxieties felt all round him upon short-horns, 

 labourers' unions, and foot-and-mouth disease. In Yorkshire 

 the moors, with their heathery covering, are the next best thing 

 to Scotland are Scotland, in short, without its glamour and 

 romance. When the brown streamlet under the hills on which 

 we walk is seized at the end of the valley, five miles off, and 

 turned into a vast tank, built by some company, to supply 

 Manchester or Leeds with water, and the whitewashed walls of 

 some hideous factory catch the sight on the acclivity beyond, 

 sensitive natures feel that they have not yet got far enough 

 North. The heather is the same, but its associations are in- 



