Virtually unknown, except to the scientific, in America, where it has never been native, the ordinary or Scottish variety of heather, wherever seen, has been largely imported by the sons and daughters of Scotland. Heather is now found sporadic on the Atlantic Coast from Newfoundland to New Jersey. More welcome than the thistle, in which many hillsides of Scotland “are very fertile,” as Dr. Johnson remarks, the heather has brought beauty to the eye and charm to the landscape, instead of calamity, as in Australia, where it “is nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned.” As for usefulness, the heather to the Scots is almost what the bamboo is to the Japanese, in its myriad applications to rural purposes. It is, first of all, to the women, a broom plant. The largest stalks are made into a broom; or, as the Scotch say, the “besom,” which readers of Isaiah associate chiefly with destruction. The shorter stems are tied into bundles that serve as brushes. It is Scotch humor that calls a low, worthless woman a “besom,” while the proverb declares that “there is little to the rake to get, after the besom.” The long trailing shoots of the heather are woven into baskets. Dug up with the peat about its roots, the “cling heath” not only makes good fuel, but it often supplies the only material for heating and cooking that can be obtained on the dry moors. In primitive days, the “shealings,” or huts of the Highlanders, were constructed of heath stems connected together with peat mud, and worked into a kind of mortar, with dry grass or straw. Even to-day hunting-lodges, temporary sheds, and cattle houses are often built in the same way and roofed with the same plant. The luxurious bed of the ancient Gael was made by spreading the heather on the floor or bunk, with its flowers upward, making a soft and springy mattress. To-day, many a deer-stalker, hill shepherd, or tramping tourist is glad to make bedding of the same material. In former times, before Scotland had become almost a synonym for whiskey and her glens for distilleries, the young shoots were used in brewing, as a substitute for hops, while for tanning material they have always served.