Now This Creeping, Spreading Plant, Like Most
Plants That Grow On The Close-Cropped Sheep-Walks, Whose
Safety Lies In
Their power to root themselves and live very
close to the surface, yet must ever strive to lift its flowers
Into the unobstructed light and air and to overtop or get away
from its crowding neighbours. On one side of the road, where
the turf had been cut by the spade in a sharp line, the plant
had found a rare opportunity to get space and light and had
thrust out such a multitude of bowering sprays, projecting
them beyond the turf, as to form a close band or rope of
orange-yellow, which divided the white road from the green
turf, and at one spot extended unbroken for upwards of a mile.
The effect was so singular and pretty that I had haunted this
road for days for the pleasure of seeing that flower border
made by nature. Now all colour was extinguished: beneath and
around me there was a dimness which at a few yards' distance
deepened to blackness, and above me the pale dim blue sky
sprinkled with stars; but as I walked I had the image of that
brilliant band of yellow colour in my mind.
By and by the late moon rose, and a little later the east
began to grow lighter and the dark down to change
imperceptibly to dim hoary green. Then the exquisite colours
of the dawn once more, and the larks rising in the dim
distance - a beautiful unearthly sound - and so in the end I
came to "The Stones," rejoicing, in spite of a cloud which now
appeared on the eastern horizon to prevent the coming sun from
being seen, that I had the place to myself.
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