After the heather ripens, the seeds remain a long time in the capsules, and furnish food to serve all kinds of birds, but especially to the red grouse, which finds here the major portion of its sustenance. The tender tops yield a large part of the winter fodder of the hill flocks; for, when the mountain grasses and rushes are no longer luscious or accessible, the sheep will perforce crop the heather. This fact is the basis of one of those cherished notions, which local pride, especially when “there’s money in it,”--and of like nature all over the world,--has so generously furnished. It is a notion, almost dangerous in some localities to dispute, that the fine flavor of Scotch mutton comes from the sheep’s diet of heather tops, which menu, however, exists much more largely in popular imagination than in actual reality. Despite the pressure of the trade and the demand for the daily square miles of newspaper stock required for an insatiable reading public, manufacturers have not yet been able to make heather stalks compete with other materials in making paper. The stalks are not sufficiently fibrous for this special purpose. Two of the four hundred and twenty known species of heather yield great store of honey, furnishing a plentiful supply to the bees in moorland districts. To secure a good crop, thousands of hives are annually transported to the moors during heather-blossom time. It is highly probable that from this honey the ancient Picts brewed the mead, said by Boethius to have been made from the flowers themselves. In the long stretch of the æons and centuries, through the alchemy of sun and water, the heather has deposited the peat which to-day serves for fuel, and of which recent science has, with the aid of molasses, made food for horses and cattle. Of the known species of the genus _Erica_, most are native to the south of Africa, but the British Isles produce seven species, of which some have been found only in Ireland. The heather “bells,” so often alluded to in British song, are the flowers of the cross-leaved and the five-leaved heather. Apart from song, these blooms flourish in the field of rhetoric and conversation sparkles with references to them. “To take to the heather” is a euphemism for absconding. To be “on one’s own native heather” is to be at home. “The heather has taken fire” when a man is in passion, an orator is eloquent, or the populace is in anger. The heather, or “heath,” as many natives call it, has its own inhabitants. The little sandpiper is called the “heather peeper.” Then there is the heath fowl, or moor hen,--its young being called the “heath polt,” or pullets,--and the “black grouse” is her husband. According to Thompson, in his “Seasons,”-- “O’er the trackless waste The heath hen flutters, pious fraud, to lead The hot pursuing spaniel far away.” In America we call this heath hen the pinnated, ruffled, or Canada grouse.