flowery carpet at our feet. Here a patch of wild thyme, all alive with bees, reddens the ground: there stand erect the flat massed heads of the milfoil, some white and some a rosy-pink, above their feathery leaves. Pressing close into the turf are the tiny waxen clusters of the quinsy-wort, recalling those of its allies, the woodruff and the bedstraws, but, unlike them, often tinged with pink; and alongside of it lie the golden foam-like clusters of the true lady's-bedstraw, set off by its circlets of dark green leaflets. The bushy little eye-bright, two or three inches high, demands attention with its tiny purple-tinged, jagged leaves, and its wide-gaping flowerets. These, small as they are, will, as the advertisements say, "well repay perusal," being delicately lined with lilac and yellow, and presenting considerable variety. One side of our lawn is red with the waving wiry stalks and globular heads of the salad burnet. This plant, the acidulous taste of which makes it a favourite with sheep, is, as Mr Grant Allen has pointed out, an interestingly degraded type of the rose tribe. Though its sepals are tinged, like its stalks, with red, it has no petals, and the pollen from the clusters of pale stamens which hang out of the lower flowers in each head is carried, not by insect-visitants, but by the wind, to the tufted crimson stigmas in the upper flowers.

This bastard toad-flax that lies prostrate over the edge of an old cart track is a curious plant, a perennial parasite upon the roots of its neighbours, with stiff, narrow little leaves and tiny greenish-white flowers; but what we have specially come here to see are these varied and interesting representatives of the orchid family, which are dotted over the whole turfy surface. In former years I have found here the little green-flowered musk orchis, with its two glossy leaves, stem not more than six inches long, and flowers with trilobed lip; but orchids are capricious in their appearance, and, apart altogether from the unwarrantable depredations of collectors, who are seldom likely to succeed in cultivating them, often disappear from various causes. heap of flints for mending the road once to my knowledge destroyed the only root of the man orchis known in a large district. The man is here, however, with the bee, the sweet-scented, and the pyramidal orchids, so we may well be content, as four such interesting species are not to be found together every day. The man orchis certainly reminds us of the tway-blade we found on a previous ramble; but it has not the two large leaves, and is altogether a yellower and a more

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delicate plant. The lip of the flower, with its two arms and two legs hanging from the over-arching green hood, has an almost comic suggestion of Socrates' "two-legged animal without feathers." No flower is better named than the pyramidal orchis, its rich crimson flowers being crowded, especially at first, into a short, abruptly tapering spike, that is truly pyramidal in outline. Hereabouts the sweet-scented orchis is a most abundant and luxuriant species, its many-flowered spikes of blossom, having much of the perfume of the lilac, being sometimes nearly a foot in length. At the tapering apex the buds are deep rosy crimson; but the lower, more open, blossoms, with their slender curving spurs, are lilac, fading still paler towards the base.

In many respects, however, the bee orchis is the most interesting of the four. The following passage from Isaac Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature" is an amusing instance of that little learning which in some cases is truly "a dangerous thing."

"Nature has formed a bee, apparently feeding in the breast of the flower, with so much exactness, that it is impossible at a very small distance to distinguish the imposition. Langhorne elegantly notices its appearance

"See on that flow'ret's velvet breast,

How close the busy vagrant lies!

His thin-wrought plume, his downy breast,

The ambrosial gold that swells his thighs.
Perhaps his fragrant load may bind

His limbs ;--we'll set the captive free-
I sought the living bee to find,

And found the picture of a bee.'

The late Mr Jackson, of Exeter, wrote to me on the subject: 'This orchis is common near our sea coasts; but instead of being exactly like a bee, it is not like it at all. It has a general resemblance to a fly, and by the help of the imagination may be supposed to be a fly pitched upon the flower. . . . An ingenious botanist, a stranger to me, after reading this article, was so kind as to send me specimens of the fly orchis, Ophrys muscifera, and of the bee orchis, Ophrys apifera. Their resemblance to these insects when in full flower is the most perfect conceivable; they are distinct plants. The poetical eye of Langhorne was equally correct and fanciful; and that too of Jackson, who differed so positively. Many controversies have been carried on from a want

of a little more knowledge; like that of the bee orchis and the fly orchis, both parties prove to be right."

When, however, we turn from the poetical contemplation of Nature to scientific interpretation, the case of the bee orchis is no less interesting. Growing generally less than a foot high, and bearing only a few flowers rather far apart, these flowers certainly resemble rather a bee in a flower than a bee alone. The white sepals are broad and spreading, and are tinged, sometimes deeply, with pink; but the rounded, velvet brown, and curiously marked lip-petal is marvellously like the abdomen of a bee, as it would be seen if visiting the flower. It has been suggested that the object of this resemblance is to warn off real bees from the flower; for, strange to say, whilst almost every other orchid is dependent upon insect visitors for the conveyance of its pollen to the stigma of another flower, the bee orchis is not in any way dependent upon such aid. True, it has these conspicuous blossoms, and its pollen is united, as in most other orchids, into two pollen-masses, as if to be carried away, as it is in those other cases, on the head or proboscis of an insect, and so to pollinate another flower; but, in its case, pollen from another flower was shown by Darwin to have no fertilising effect, whilst its own pollen-masses spontaneously fall forward, and swaying in the wind pollinate its own stigma. It seems as if Nature had altered her mind, and having contrived a whole group of flowers highly specialised for one purpose, viz., cross-pollination by insects, has made one in which, in spite of many such special structures, she has abandoned the main object for which they would seem to exist.

Buzz! While we have been studying orchids, the light has begun to fail. Yellow-wort and centaury are now fast closed, and this great black stag beetle, having flown right in my face, has now fallen at my feet. He is perhaps the finest of his race in England, and his "antlers" give him a more ferocious aspect than his true fighting powers can maintain, pugnacious as he is with his own species. It is sometimes almost as useful to look fierce as to be so.

IN HAYFIELDS BY THE THAMES

"High on the crest of the blossoming grasses,
Bending and swaying with face toward the sky,
Stirred by the lightest west wind as it passes,
Hosts of the silver-white daisy-stars lie!

"I, looking up through the mists of the flowers,
I, lying low on the earth thrilled with June,
Give not a thought to the vanishing hours,
Save that they melt into twilight too soon!

'Buttercups' lanterns are lighted about me,
Burly red clover's warm cheek presses mine;
Powdery Bee never once seems to doubt me,
Tipping each chalice for Summer's new wine!

"Tiny white butterflies ('Brides' children name them)
Flicker and glimmer, and turn in their flight;
Surely the sunshine suffices to tame them,
Close to my hand they will swing and alight!"

MARGARET DELAND.

CERTAINLY in June sunshine our nostrils are as strongly appealed to as are our eyes. As we go towards the river we pass through a field of beans in full flower, and through another of red clover. There is little that is beautiful about the neutral greys of the bean-field; and handsome as is the red clover when mingled with other plants in the pasture, here, but for its fragrance, it would be monotonous in its level mass of red surmounting green. The air is heavily laden also with the perfume from yonder hawthorn hedgerow, where the boughs bend down under their load of creamy sweetness into the high grass at their foot. Hay harvest has begun, and has brought with it a whole gamut of deliciously varied aromas. New-mown grass, hay which has been drying for one day, and that which has been drying for two, each has its distinctive smell. By the gate of the meadow we come to a striking display of colour without noticeable perfume, a bushy plant of the common mallow. Its rounded leaves are smothered in dust from the road, but its many flowers rise gaudily aloft careless of their surroundings. The pink petals are strongly lined with violet honey-guides, and

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in the centre rises the clustering mass of many purple anthers. other flowers the pollen is already discharged, the stamens fall withered towards the bottom of the flower, and twining among them, to collect pollen brought by bees from other blossoms, are the long crimson stigmas. The flower is rather variable in its colouring; but it is from its general effect, rather than from any one of its component tints, that we get our notion of the colour known from it as mauve.

It is interesting to trace the changing hues that have passed over this riverside meadow since its green surface appeared from beneath last winter's snows. First spangled with little silver daisies; then flooded with broad sheets of lady's-smock and illuminated with golden dandelions; it was covered next with buttercups as with burnished metal. Now only a few dandelion clocks remain, and pink and red sorrels and large midsummer daisies mix with the grey flower-heads of the tall grasses to tone down the still numerous buttercups. There is likely to be a good grass crop here, and the numerous green velvetlike spikes of the crested dog's-tail grass, while indicative of this prospect, serve also to remind us of a favourite pastime of haymaking time in our youth. Three heads of this grass were taken, and round their stalks others were closely twisted. This formed one branch of a tree, and many such were united in the same way by twisting heads, selected for their length, until a many-branched but decidedly conventionalised tree was the result. Such trees may yet be seen ornamenting the cottage chimney-piece in many parts of England.

The black heads of the ribwort plantain, now hung with creamwhite anthers swinging in the breeze that sweeps over the unmown grass, remind us also of how they served in summer the purpose of the horse-chestnut in autumn, in ministering to the emulation and destructiveness which are seemingly innate in the nature of man, at least in the boy stage. Their tough stalks offered some resistance in this game of "Conqueror," even when, long gathered and bruised, they withered in the hot hands of the little rivals. Here among the grass are some of the richly-coloured flowers of the green-winged orchis. Its leaves are not blotched with crimson like those of the early purple species of our woodlands; but the flowers of the two are similar. The green veins in the two over-arching hood-petals are, however, distinctive; and if we look about we may very probably find some examples of a pretty pale pink variety.