Railway Birds and Flowers 135 



grass. Unlike the closely variegated pattern of 

 the spring primroses and anemones, these moon 

 daisies and clover blossoms of midsummer grow, 

 for the most part, in broad sheets and stains of 

 their own colour. Besides the green of the grass 

 itself, shot here and there with the buff or purple 

 bloom of the ripe seed, another element of contrast 

 is continually present in the yellow of hawkweed 

 or birdsfoot trefoil, or some other midsummer 

 representative of this most common hue. There 

 are also many shades of contrast among the yellows 

 themselves. The birdsfoot shines with a sanguine 

 orange, several shades deeper than the gold of the 

 gorse ; individual blossoms are often streaked and 

 splashed with crimson, and even as they are seen 

 from the train this adds a fervour to their glow. 

 Broom-flower and the innumerable hawkweed blos- 

 soms have a clear, fulgent yellow. The abundant 

 heads of the small trailing hop clover are not only 

 paler and softer, but have a cool opaqueness of tone 

 which is no less striking as a contrast to the glowing 

 depths in the massed blossom of birdsfoot or of 

 broom. The same cool yellow is seen in the much 

 larger blossoms of the lady's fingers, which is very 

 abundant in June on some of the railway banks in 

 the chalk country in Buckinghamshire. Red clover 

 blossom, on the other hand, is extremely trans- 

 parent in tone ; it is the softest and most luminous 

 of all the red blossoms of the midsummer grass. 

 Pink campion grows richly on many banks ; and by 

 the moist flanks of woods, or in the cooler uplands 

 of the north, we may see the torn petals of the 



