Blessed is the heather, for it enlivens the sterile lands of northern and western Europe, which otherwise would be almost appalling in their vistas of desolation! Great masses of heather give, even to the most forbidding landscapes, a beauty suggesting something like human sympathy. The common heather, like the man suddenly lifted to fame and fortune, is apt to show the lack of early advantages, but give this plant of the moors a sheltered place and kindly care, and it will grow erect and “heave out its blooms”--as said an old mariner--so as to touch the top of a yardstick. With purple stems, close-leaved green fruit, and feathery spikes of bell-shaped flowers, this _Calluna vulgaris_ is one of the handsomest of the heath flowers. Some heather is white, but most of the plants are of a lilac rose color, varying through pink to purple. It is this varying depth of color in the blooms which adds to the glory of the August moors and hillsides. Under ordinary environment, most of the plants have no human care to give them comfortable growth. Out on the desolate moor, or on the arid slopes, each bush has to wrestle with the tempest and withstand the bombardment of sand and gravel hurled by the wind. Though like the pine of Clan Alpine, “the firmer it roots him, the stronger it blows,” yet the life of the heather is a constant struggle. Even though it rise but a few inches above the surface, its roots must be anchored deep in the ground to prevent its being blown away. Its white stalk must become gray, hard, and tough, if the plant is to live. The blossoming of the heather, even though it be “the meanest flower that blows,” is hailed with delight as the opening of Nature’s floral calendar. With its clusters of pink, in the time of flowering in midsummer, and its mass of purple later on, it has a strange power to awaken deep-lying thoughts. To the natives, more especially, this wee, modest flower has a mystic potency to please and charm. It rouses among them, at home and abroad, a feeling of patriotism. It becomes, in the Scotsman’s associations, a link between his soul and the ground out of which he came and into which he will go. Probably no toiling and homesick Scot, pining in a foreign land, longs for anything in the old homeland so much as for a sight of his native heather. To hold before his dying eyes a sprig of “the bonnie” has been known to light there a gleam such as nothing else can.