My host went on: “Some time ago I walked up to the little moor that overlooks the Clyde, from which you see ships far off lying at the Tail of the Bank, the smoke of Greenock and Port Glasgow, the estuary itself, though miles away, looking like a sheet of frosted silver or dark-grey steel, according to the season, and in the distance the range of hills called Argyle’s Bowling Green, with the deep gap that marks the entrance to the Holy Loch. Autumn had just begun to tinge the trees, birches were golden, and rowans red, the bents were brown and dry. A few bog asphodels still showed amongst the heather, and bilberries, dark as black currants, grew here and there amongst the carpet of green sphagnum and the stag’s-head moss. The heather was all rusty brown, but still there was, as it were, a recollection of the summer in the air. Just the kind of day you feel inclined to sit down on the lee side of a dry-stone dyke, and smoke and look at some familiar self-sown birch that marks the flight of time, as you remember that it was but a year or two ago that it had first shot up above the grass. “I remember two or three plants of tall hemp-agrimony still had their flower heads withered on the stalk, giving them a look of wearing wigs, and clumps of ragwort still had a few bees buzzing about them, rather faintly, with a belated air. I saw all this—not that I am a botanist, for you know I can hardly tell the difference between the Cruciferæ and the Umbelliferæ, but because when you live in the country some of the common plants seem to obtrude themselves upon you, and you have got to notice them in spite of you. So I walked on till I came to a wrecked plantation of spruce and of Scotch fir. A hurricane had struck it, turning it over almost in rows, as it was planted. The trees had withered in most cases, and in the open spaces round their upturned roots hundreds of rabbits burrowed, and had marked the adjoining field with little paths, just like the lines outside a railway-station. “I saw all this, not because I looked at it, for if you look with the idea of seeing everything, commonly everything escapes you, but because the lovely afternoon induced a feeling of well-being and contentment, and everything seemed to fall into its right proportion, so that you saw first the harmonious whole, and then the salient points most worth the looking at.