i8o COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



by the little rapids where the beck tumbles by miniature 

 cascades into the pond, the aromatic sweet-gale grows 

 in unwonted profusion : smallest of our native catkin- 

 bearing trees (except the dwarf creeping willows), it 

 loves the neighbourhood of running water, where its 

 little thickset bushes rise to a height of two or three feet 

 only, and its clusters of tiny nuts, dotted with little balls 

 of resin like beads of amber, overhang the petty brink 

 with their fragrant bunches. Crush the shiny foliage 

 between your fingers, and it yields at once a grateful 

 country perfume, redolent of the wholesome resin in its 

 dotted leaves. Here, too, are tall bur-reeds, with their 

 globular heads of greenish flowers ; and here are great 

 graceful white-blossomed arrowheads ; and here are the 

 lolling heart-shaped leaves of the floating pond-weed ; 

 and here again are the tall black reeds, looking like 

 natural maces, with their thick black heads and their 

 waving summit of ragged fluffy cotton, standing sentinel 

 in long rows over the shorter vegetation in their shadow 

 beneath. 



The truth is, our ordinary taste in the matter of 

 flowers, and especially of wild flowers, is still a trifle 

 barbaric. The first thing that strikes children or savages 

 in flowers is their brightly coloured petals ; they care 

 little for beauty of shape in blossoms, for gracefulness 

 and delicacy of outline in foliage, for the glossy leaves 

 of the holly or the hartstongue, for the infinite variety 

 that custom cannot stale in the crisped and wrinkled 

 fronds of ferns. When they pick a nosegay, it is all 

 bright blossoms without a touch of relieving verdure : 

 the only thing they care for is the crude staring red and 

 blue of the largest petals. Accordingly, all the earliest 



