26 FAMILIAR WILD FLO WEES. 



the quiet, awed feeling grows upon us, for we stand 

 beneath the roof of a cathedral grander than any human 

 pile, and catch the strains of a harmony no human voices 

 can give us. The open moorland, on the contrary, gives 

 a sense of exhilaration, and the heart and chest alike 

 expand, for before us in the quivering sunlight stretch 

 miles and miles of rolling country, till the purple horizon 

 melts into the azure of the sky, and all the foreground 

 glows with the rich crimson of the heath or the gold 

 of the furze. As the butterflies flit past us, and the 

 " busy bee," busier than ever with a sense of the im- 

 portance of harvesting as much as possible of the nectar 

 spread around, goes bustling by, while the lark shoots into 

 the vault of heaven, and pours from thence his ecstasy in 

 song, we share the universal happiness, and as we struggle 

 knee-deep through the heather, and draw in deep draughts 

 of the pure air, the mere sense of living becomes an 

 exquisite enjoyment. 



Our readers, possibly, at this point may say that this 

 sort of thing is all very well, but what about the heath 

 itself, the ostensible cause ? All that we know about the 

 heath shall be duly set down in good time, but if our 

 feeble attempt to describe the home of the heath shall send 

 our readers in quest of it themselves, we shall have done 

 them a far greater service than any pictured presentment 

 or verbal description we can offer them is worth. 



Though it is now some years since we saw it, we 

 remember perfectly the curious effect we once observed "on 

 the North Welsh coast. When at sunset the mountains 

 round Penmanmawr were all clothed in purple, one of them 

 nightly assumed a redder tinge than any of the others. 

 At the distance from which we were then viewing the range 



