288 THE LAND'S END 



The commonest of all flowers, the buttercup, is one 

 of these, as I first beheld it covering whole meadows 

 with its pure delicately brilliant yellow. I remember 

 at the end of the African War coming up one day in 

 April from Southampton in a train full of soldiers 

 just back from the veldt, and when a meadow bright 

 with buttercups came in sight the men in my com- 

 partment all jumped up and shouted with joy. That 

 sight made them realise as no other could have 

 done, that they were at home once more in England. 

 The wild hyacinth is another flower which took a 

 distinguished place in my mind from the first moment 

 of its coming before my sight, a sea of misty blue 

 beneath the woodland trees in their tender early 

 spring foliage. Another is the gorse from the day 

 I looked on a wide common aflame with its bloom, 

 still another the briar rose first beheld in the 

 greatest luxuriance and abundance on a vast unkept 

 hedge in Southern England. Then, too, the fritillary 

 on the occasion of my first finding it growing wild in 

 a water-meadow and standing, as in a field of corn, 

 knee-deep amidst the tens and hundreds of thousands 

 of crowded slender stems with their nodding pendu- 

 lous tulips so strangely chequered with darkest purple 

 and luminous pink. But over all the revelations of 

 the glory of flowers 1 have experienced in this land 

 I hold my first sight of heather in bloom on the 

 Scottish moors in August shortly after coming to this 

 country. I remember how I went out and walked 

 many miles over the moors, lured ever on by the 

 sight of that novel loveliness until I was lost in 



