ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 
Nature Notes: 
THE SELBORNE SOCIETrS MHGHZINE. 
No. 215. NOVEMBER, 1907. Vol. XVIII. 
PINES AND MOORLAND. 
“ O, whit hive I to do with time ? 
For this the day was made ! ” 
O true, those many years back. .And true again to-day, 
here in the soul ot the country, where the great earth 
lies in greenest stillness, and time may stand still, may 
have ceased to be, for all we know or care. So quiet 
it is, so wrapped in a “ plenitude of peace,” that one might well 
imagine the green waving of grasses, and the nodding of tall 
daisies over Time’s grave, and the brown rust creeping, inch by 
slow inch, on the sharpness of his scythe. 
We come slowly, slowly up the lane. Such a lane as it is, 
too ! Surely nowhere such a dear lane as here in Surrey. 
Winding up slowly, steeper and steeper the higher it climbs, a 
little lane of rutted gold sand, all the brighter, here and there, 
for last night’s splash of rain. High banks rise on either side, 
thrusting out frowning brows of knotted tree-roots, all writhen 
and twisted like the limbs of a gnome. One glances involun- 
tarily into the little hollows as one goes by, half wondering that 
no weird little brown face peers out — puckered, elfish, unhuman, 
laughing a shrill cry of a laugh at our slow plodding up the 
steep, while they, the little earth-people, go so light of foot. 
Is it only the children that see these things invisible to us, we 
wonder ? We elders — so they tell us — whose hearts have been 
“ heavy with human tears,” are blind thereafter for ever to the 
gnome-folk. But look ! If we are waiting wonders, there, up 
above on the high bank, among the long grasses, rise a few late 
foxgloves, tall, purple spires stately in the bracken and under- 
growth. One always looked at them with a sort of awed wonder 
in one's early childhood — or, at any rate, I did — as something 
almost too beautiful to pick, too lonely and aloof, somehow, for 
such familiarity ; much in the same way as, later in life, one 
hesitates to speak to a fellow-creature upon whose face is 
