THE MOUNTAIN BOG 227 



still they flaunted their splendour unconquered, and made 

 that small wet dell a brilliant basin of blue. Alas ! I 

 would that such persistence, such generosity, would mark 

 Gentiana bavarica in England. Give it the choicest place 

 in your choicest bog, nm-se it up with silver sand and finest 

 mixtures. But it will seldom be permanent. Perhaps we 

 cannot give it rigours enough of climate — not sufficient 

 sternness at one moment of the year, and enough con- 

 tinuous encouragement at the other. 



Now the stream has reached the plainland of the last 

 huts, the summer station of the cattle and their keepers. 

 Here is a little meadow, perfectly flat and smiling, through 

 which runs a placid brook as through many an English 

 lowland. Its banks are dense with common nettle and 

 blue Monkshood, thanks to the corrupting occupancy of 

 man, who, wherever he may go across the world, takes 

 with him all his weeds — moral, no less than vegetable, to 

 thrive abominably and wax gross in virgin soil. Beyond 

 the wooden huts lies a colony of boulders by the water- 

 side, fallen from the slope above, which rises starkly 

 overhead towards the moraine. On these huge rocks are 

 found earnests of the promise above us — Senecio Doroni- 

 cum. Primulas, a few stray plants of Asplenium septen- 

 trionale and Lloydia serotina. These are both natives, 

 but rarissvmi, of North Wales. The fern is a strange, 

 wee thing, linear-leaved, forked like a serpent's tongue ; 

 the Spider's-wort, from its tiny bulb, emits a few thread- 

 like leaves and then a dull white blossom like a star. I 

 quested for it once among the dark rocks in the Devil's 

 Kitchen above Llyn Idwal. No place has ever so 

 daunted me ; on all sides black, awful precipices dropped 

 towards a black, unsmiling little lake far down at their 

 heart ; clouds, gloom, and storm made the inhabitants of 

 that dreadful world. Timidly and abjectly I hunted the 

 Lloydia, frail pale Princess of so grim a keep. The 



