4 
DEEP SANDSTONE LANES. 
boughs. In some spots the polypody, twistmg and inter- 
lacing its creeping scaly stem with the tough, half-exposed 
roots of hazel, maple, oak and hawthorn, grows in such 
luxuriance and profusion, that its gold-dotted fronds hang 
by thousands — aye, hundreds of thousands — over the 
stumps and roots, forming the most graceful of coverings. 
Here and there are great tufts of hart's-tongue, with its 
bright, broad, shining, wavy leaves. Here and there, 
where water has filtered through chinks in the sandstone, 
so as to keep up a streak of moisture down the bank, we 
have lady-fern and a host of mosses. Here and there, in 
holes — little cavernous recesses — the face of the damp 
sand or sandstone is powdered over with a diversity of 
lichens. Here and there the lithe snake-like honeysuckle 
twines round the straight upright young stems of the nut- 
tree, cutting deeply into their substance, and forcing them 
out of their stiff propiiety into strange corkscrew forms : — 
up it goes, and getting above the heads of its supporters, 
spreads its own sweet laughing blossoms to the sun. Here 
and there is a dense network of the wild clematis, clothed 
with downy seeds — a plant so loved by Scott, that, with a 
poet's licence, he transplanted it from our warm hedgerows 
to the cold rocky scenery of Ketturin and Venue, a bota- 
nical blunder which few of his readers will detect and none 
criticise severely. I love these lanes, because Nature has 
so long had her own way in them ; and where Nature is 
left to herself, she always acts wisely, beautifully and well. 
There is not a foot of surface in these old hollow ways, but 
has its peculiar charms. 
To lovers of birds such lanes have special attractions, 
for they abound in those wild-briary thickets in which our 
summer birds delight to hide themselves and to nestle. 
