AMONG THE NUTS. 115 



how to use herbs, as wood-sage or wood-betony. Most 

 of the gardens have a few plants of the milky-veined 

 holy thistle — good, they say, against inflammations, and 

 in which they have much faith. Soon after the May 

 garlands the meadow orchis comes up, which is called 

 1 dead men's hands/ and after that the ' ram's-horn ' 

 orchis, which has a twisted petal ; and in the evening 

 the bat, which they call flittermouse, appears again. 



The light is never the same on a landscape many 

 minutes together, as all know who have tried, ever so 

 crudely, to fix the fleeting expression of the earth with 

 pencil. It is ever changing, and in the same way as you 

 walk by the hedges day by day there is always some 

 fresh circumstance of nature, the interest of which in a 

 measure blots out the past. This morning we found a 

 bramble leaf, something about which has for the moment 

 put the record of months aside. This bramble leaf was 

 marked with a grey streak, which coiled and turned and 

 ran along beside the midrib, forming a sort of thoughtless 

 design, a design without an idea. The Greek fret seems 

 to our eyes in its regularity and its repetition to have a 

 human thought in it. The coils and turns upon this 

 leaf, like many other markings of nature, form a design- 

 less design, the idea of which is not traceable back to a 

 mind. They are the work of a leaf-boring larva which 

 has eaten its way between the two skins of the leaf, 

 much like boring a tunnel between the two surfaces of 

 a sheet of paper. If you take a needle you can insert 

 the point in the burrow and pass it along wherever the 

 bore is straight, so that the needle lies between the two 

 sides of the leaf. Off-hand, if any one were asked if it 

 were possible to split a leaf, he would say no. This little 

 creature, however, has worked along inside it, and lived 

 there. The upper surface of the leaf is a darker green, 



