Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/434

404 dampness, indeed, under slabs of rock, the Cystopteris fragilis and the gleaming white flowers of the familiar wood sorrel are seen, and always inseparable; and on the lower edges of the hill, where the little streams soak out, we found the butterwort in abundance, its parchment-like leaves with their curled edges shining out starlike in the still wintry grass. But on the mountain-top, where other and stranger plants grow among the dark bog-pools, there was as yet no sign of summer life. Only the diminutive Luzula spicata did what it could to make colour, with its golden anthers gleaming from brown flowers amidst the waste of heather, which had as yet put out no spring shoots. We only saw one butterfly, a Pieris napi, and that seemed half asleep, perhaps wholly disappointed in a world too wet for its fresh wings. The only links with the spring, the almost summer indeed, of the valley were the numbers of Common Heath moths which were fluttering among the heather, undismayed by the showery day.

We had to cross two wild heather-clad hills before we reached the Ring-Ouzels' haunt, but when we reached it we owned that they were birds of taste. At the head of their dingle two hills join, and there a waterfall runs down, its course marked among the rocks by brightest green of soft, cushiony moss, by tufts of Nephrodium dilatatum. The scene was desolate wildness, bounded on the west by the steep rocks and the waterfall, on the north and south by the two bare mountain sides, while on the east stretched the at first narrow valley, with its brawling stream. The mountains were patterned over by great stones, by larger slabs of fallen rock, by patches of heather, black, tragic, in colour as if burnt, and showing yet no tinge of spring green, by patches of bilberry covered by pinky green leaves and a few pink flowers, but which in the distance and in the mass seem only a dull sullen yellow. Only one tree broke the straight sky-line of the solemn mountains, a rowan tree growing high up amid the rocks, and as yet destitute of leaves.

It was a land of waters. I tried, as I sat and waited for the coy Ring-Ouzels, to think of "the silence which is among the hills," but the thought did not do. The air was full of the noise of the water-pipes: water leaping down the head of the dingle, water murmuring on down the valley, water springing out of the mountain sides and sliding over the grass in narrow streams