204 
NATURE NOTES 
and the great dim distance, our feet on the springing goodness of 
the heather, and the sight and smell of it good to eyes and 
nostrils. O, the good world ! O, the glad golden world ! Golden 
comes the sun a-glinting through the swaying heather, as we lie 
facing skywards, all among its tufted softness, and glad the 
laughing wind, honey-scented from the paler, shyer ling, all 
a-bloom. And O ! the wonders that earth holds, so quick with 
life and motion as she is to-day ! 
Now it is a ferret hop-hopping out of the heather and in 
again ; now a squirrel darting up a tree like a lightning flash. 
(They need not hurry so from their friends, if only they knew, 
but they don’t, more’s the pity.) Now the murmured coo-coo of 
far-off pigeons, or the tinkling of a cow-bell somewhere out of 
sight : and running like a refrain through it all, the droning hum 
of comfortable bees in our ears. No more irresistibly soporific a 
lullaby than this, on a summer’s day, if we are minded to sleep, 
and no better couch than the good heather. 
For the moment, however, our eyes are wakeful. There is 
so much to see. Look ! fellow-lovers, let me show you one or 
two of Nature’s tiny miracles. Deep down, among the twisted 
heather-roots, the lower leaves of the little whin-bushes have 
flamed red, as if conscious of the necessity of creating a little 
sun all of their own, since the real one cannot reach them ; and, 
see you, the wee spiders scurrying up and down so fast, are 
scarlet too ; and there, swinging by its scarce visible chain, from 
the heather-stem, the tiny caterpillar repeats it in green and 
purple — such wee, wee things, and yet life ! and worth so much 
trouble in the making, too. There’s the puzzle to tease our 
brains many a time. But ah ! the wise great Mother, how wise 
she is, with a wisdom as near comparable to ours as the moun- 
tain to the molehill. Not even one of these infinitesimal lives 
left unprotected, for she knows they are “ bidden to be here,” 
tiny, unnoticed atoms, without which the building of the mighty 
Edifice would be incomplete. 
Another page to turn — more wonders yet and more. Leave 
the heather-couch and the droning bees for a wee while, and 
come over the moor with me deep into the great pine woods. 
Here is not wonder only, but dim high mystery and a great 
stillness. Sun and wind are shut out here. So still they stand, 
these mighty trees, so shadowy in their purple dimness, that it 
is only when we look up and see their swaying tops as blurred 
outlines in gleaming gold that we remember there are such 
things as sun and wind at all. A fairy palace full of the glamour 
of mystic colour, a place of illusion and enchantment. 
We look around, not knowing what may be there next. Is 
yon high bracken bracken indeed ? Look ! one vividness of 
burning green below, and strange cold blue above where the 
light falls. O ! surely a place where fairy things must pass, 
where surely, in some happy hour, even one or two of us dull 
mortals must hear the sweet shrill blowing of Fan's pipe, or 
