2 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



peculiar tastes and habits it has inherited from its re- 

 motest ancestors. We lordly human beings are, per- 

 haps, too apt to overlook the essential community of 

 life and constitution between ourselves and the plants. 

 We under-estimate their unconscious intelligence and 

 their guileless cunning ; we forget that in their insen- 

 tient fashion they plot and plan and outwit one another 

 with almost human semblance of intentional strategy. 

 Yet those of us who live much in their society learn at 

 last to recognise that there is a meaning and a purpose 

 in everything they do a use for every little unnoticed 

 point of structure or habit in their divinely ordered 

 economy. Even the very date of their flowering has a 

 settled purpose of its own, and bears some definite re- 

 ference to the insect that brings the pollen, or to the 

 time needed for ripening and setting the seed. To 

 watch the succession of these little members of the 

 floral commonwealth, to learn the connection in which 

 they stand to one another, and to interpret the purpose 

 that they severally have in view these are the great 

 problems and the self-sufficing rewards of those who 

 slowly spell out for themselves from living hieroglyphics 

 the emblems of the country calendar. 



See from the edge of the hillside here how the prim- 

 roses cling, as it were on purpose, to the tumbled slopes 

 and banks of the Fore Acre, leaving almost flowerless 

 the level platforms of terrace between them. Each 

 little bank or escarpment is a perfect natural flower-bed, 

 thickly covered from top to bottom with beautiful masses 

 of tufted yellow bloom. But in between, on the inter- 

 mediate grassy bits, there are no primroses : or, to speak 

 more correctly, all the primroses there are cowslips, their 



