170 THE BOOK OF THE OPEX AIR 



this particular case of pearls and and the purpose served by his 

 rings ; and it leaves one unsatisfied, travelling this path are darkly hid 

 The pearl skipper's path of evolution away. 



XXXV 

 SUMMER IN A HEATH COUNTRY 



"There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet 

 things; there's likewise a wind on the heath." GEORGE BORROW. 



'""INHERE is one type of British blossom to meet the eye in this inert, 

 landscape which waits every slow-blooded landscape, where the dark 

 year until the verdure of most fields pine boughs and withered, rusty hea- 

 and woodlands is dimmed and staled ther-bells seem to despise the generous 

 by months of summer sunshine, and impulse of the season, and to clasp 

 then breaks forth into all the gaiety themselves still sullenly in their winter 

 and freshness of unexhausted spring, weeds. Three months pass, and then 

 In April and May, when all the copses all the glow and vigour of the spring 

 and green meadows are day by day and summer in one break forth among 

 blossoming and budding with an end- the heath and pines, with an intense 

 less succession of new verdure and and concentrated brilliance which is 

 brilliant flowers, the heath moors and all the more keenly conspicuous by 

 pine woods stand gloomily aloof and contrast with the now tarnished fresh- 

 bare. Except where the birches ness of the shorn hayfields and bronzed 

 shake out their sprays of delicate green, deciduous woods. Lying in the fringe 

 or the tardy alder unfolds its duller of the July pines, where the heather- 

 foliage in some marshy bottom, the tussocks stop short, like curling waves, 

 eye almost completely misses the fresh- on a smooth shore of dry, shining 

 ness and awakening of spring among needles, we see how the whole scheme 

 these swarthy wastes ; in the days of vegetation within our view is at the 

 when the green lanes and budding very zenith of its brilliancy. The 

 hazel woods are overflowing with sheets pines themselves, so sad in April, and 

 of primroses and bluebells, and all the regardless of the rising flood of spring, 

 colour and perfume of the advancing are now all tagged and tufted with the 

 year, there is often not a single spring light, fresh green of their summer 



