174 Grey Rock and Thyme 



and then in winter after rain, the sunlight distils 

 a faint perfume of August from the sodden leaves. 

 The fires of far-off summer seem to linger in the dry 

 rock of the hills, even when all other soils are soaked 

 to midwinter mire, or filmed with the sour hoar- 

 frost that skims the meadows between the colder 

 rains. The damps of the hollow lanes and wood- 

 lands find no harbourage on the open slopes, that 

 dwell, with their haunting breaths of summer, in a 

 zone of purer air. 



Many other characteristic plants of the limestone 

 hills besides the thyme are seldom found so abund- 

 antly elsewhere, except on the distant slopes of the 

 chalk, which nowhere form part of the same English 

 landscapes. Most individual of all is the golden 

 cistus or rock-rose, which shakes out its disc of 

 crumpled petals on a low, branching stem. The 

 yellow rock-rose is the buttercup of the limestone 

 pastures ; and it is as much more delicate than either 

 the true buttercup of the blazing May meadows or 

 the bronze-backed celandine of March, as the turf 

 from which it springs is finer than the herbage of 

 the lowlands. The fringed leaflets of the rock-rose 

 are of the same deep and glossy green as those of the 

 thyme, and are often found so closely intertwined 

 with them among the fibrous carpet of the turf as to 

 cause surprise at their scentlessness. The crumpled 

 blossoms hang on their stems as tremulously as 

 foam, and are hardly more enduring. Their prime 

 is gone in a few hours of summer sunshine, and 

 they only open to the sun. After a summer 

 night of rain, when the morning sky is roofed 



