THE MUSIC OF WILD FLOWERS 19 



spiration of the Rev. C. A. Johns, the author of the well- 

 known Flowers of the Field, Kingsley's taste, or rather 

 passion, for botany was encouraged and developed, 

 and ever afterwards, in his parish of Eversley, at 

 Chester, where he was a canon, in his frequent holidays 

 in Devonshire, the study of wild flowers was an absorb- 

 ing recreation. How he delighted in the flora of the 

 moorland which constituted so large a portion of his 

 parish ! How could his life, he asks in his Winter 

 Garden, be monotonous when there were so many 

 wonders awaiting explanation? What, for instance, 

 " makes Erica Tetralixgrow in one soil, and the bracken 

 in another ? How did three species of club-moss one 

 of them quite an Alpine one get down here, all the way 

 from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch of grass ? 

 Why did the little mousetail, Myosurus minimus, 

 which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years, 

 appear by dozens in the fifteenth, upon a new-made 

 bank, which had been for at least two hundred years a 

 farmyard gateway " ? 



Such botanical puzzles were to him a source of 

 constant interest and pleasure. At Chester he estab- 

 lished a botanical class, with a weekly ramble in search 

 of wild flowers. At first, we are told, the class was 

 watched from the city walls with some surprise and 

 amusement, but before long the gathering became so 

 large that a man who met them supposed them to be a 

 congregation going to the opening of a Dissenting chapel 

 in the country. When at length the desire of his life 

 was gratified, and in company with his daughter he 

 visited the tropics, readers of At Last will remember 

 how he gloried in the amazing vegetation. And later, 

 when he paid a visit to America, how the Californian 



