122 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



will be found to be blackened with the sticky juice 

 with which the dandelions strive in vain to protect 

 themselves. They save themselves at last by the 

 same device of numbers that the other flowers use. 

 In the tangle of fool's-parsley, ground-ivy, and a 

 hundred other hedge-side plants, their big, round 

 faces appeal to the bees even more strongly than to 

 the children. Every one of them bears a tell-tale 

 spot, which resolves itself into a small Andrena or 

 other bee, the blackest of which will soon be painted 

 wholly yellow with pollen. Wasplets also of several 

 species, and wasp-like saw-flies, scarcely to be dis- 

 tinguished from them, dart about the bank, some 

 after minute caterpillars, others with eggs that will 

 make caterpillars. In a ten-mile tramp you will 

 scarcely find more species of flowers or insects, so 

 closely does the country hug this near suburb of 

 quite an important manufacturing town. 



In a few minutes we are beyond the range of the 

 violet-pickers. Our own fingers itch with the pre- 

 historic impulse to pluck, as, one by one, the hand- 

 some white blossoms peep out from the herbage. 

 Surely nothing is more tempting than these. The 

 tense curl of the petals makes the light glance and 

 darken with the tenderest, yet crispest, of shading. 

 They seem carven rather than shaped, but carven 

 from a material far finer than ivory, and with tools 

 that no man could wield. The white phlox of sum- 

 mer is something like them. No coloured surface 

 can play such miracles with the light. It is as 

 though nature were still a tyro in colour, but had 

 reached perfection in black-and-white. Some of our 

 sweet vjojets are purely pallid. They seem rather 



