Then it is, when the bluebells have turned to papery seed-pods, and the primroses have paled away into space, that the foxgloves begin to shake out their flowers and the hillside glows and palpitates with colour. They flourish with a joyous abandon that is positively infectious, and makes one feel there is still much left to live for. The way they suddenly appear when the trees are down—whole battalions of them—where only a season before there were regiments of larches, or thick woods of mixed timber, is really marvellous. Undoubtedly the ground must be packed with seed; more than this, there must always be young seedlings coming up among the undergrowth or in sheltered crevices where the larch needles do not penetrate; for no sooner are the trees cut than foxgloves start to spread their leaves to the light, and by the following summer, often before half the timber has been carried, you find them by the thousand—and that is a very low estimate—dotted all over the rough land, and, with a host of ferns, trying to cover up all that is maimed, and bare, and jagged, to hide the scars where the mighty have fallen, to give beauty for ashes in a very literal sense. Moreover, there seems an almost uncanny intelligence in the way they adapt themselves to their environment. You would think they knew that the winds from the far-off Channel blow strong at times, across these high open spaces; for you find that they invariably place themselves in the shelter of a big boulder, or settle down in a little hollow with a protecting flank of rockery, evidently conscious that their tall stems would be lashed down flat if exposed to the full force of the wind. Or you find them growing, it may be, at the foot of a crumbling gate post, or against an ivy-covered rock, or rows of them nestling close up to a lichen-covered stone wall; and in this way their beauty is enhanced by the background. And when they find themselves in an uncongenial setting—springing up in the very centre of a woodland path perhaps, or out in the open where the woodmen have been lopping the branches from a felled tree, and there is much devastation to be covered over and atoned for—there the foxglove lays its leaves as flat as possible against the earth, so as to offer the least inducement to the passer-by to injure it. And though it still sends up its flowers as bravely as it knows how, they are only a foot high, not the five and six feet of the foxglove in the shelter. Yet if it be possible, in the least bit possible, it leans against the pile of faggots, or gently touches the desolate trunk of what was once a majestic old tree—and who dare say that the silent companionship counts for nothing? * * * * * As I write this, in a year of the Awful War, there are some who would tell me that foxgloves will not find the people in food; while others see no value in the larches apart from their service as mine-props.