Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/345

Rh purer blaze of the setting sun; "it gleams a purple amethyst." These remarkable hills look as if transplanted here from the Highlands, all in their Highland dress; and are as Scotch in it, in the ranks of English hills to be seen drawn up over the vast levels of Oxfordshire and Worcestershire, as a regiment of Highland soldiers in kilts and tartans are among the British brigades of the line. Thus both for use and ornament they are beautiful and valuable features of the Green Border-Land of the Black Country, and thousands of all ages and conditions from the smoky district luxuriate these heathered heights in summer. Then they are famous for purple fruits as well as flowers. They supply Birmingham and other large towns far and near with bilberries of the finest size and flavour. So, any summer day in the year when the sun shines upon them, these hills are set to the music of merry voices of boys and girls, and older children who feel young on the purple heather at fifty. Then the scenery from these tops embraces a vast sweep of fertile and beautiful country. If our poet Whittier could call the central county of Massachusetts "rich and rural Worcester," he would the same and more of its English mother, if he could see Old England's Worcestershire from one of the Lickey Hills. You see on one side of the great green valley of the Severn the