maroon red, with yellow legs; also that they were both beautiful and more graceful in their carriage than any bird of their family known to him. Before he would cease wondering at the presence at Swarraton of these Magellanic geese, no longer strange to any living person's eye in England, lo! a fresh wonder--beautiful yellow flowers by the stream, unlike any flower that grew there in his day, or by any stream in Hampshire. But how long after White's time did that flower run wild in Hampshire? I asked, and then thought that I might get the answer from some old person who had spent a long life at that spot. I went no farther than the nearest cottage to find the very one I wanted, an ancient dame of seventy-four, who had never lived anywhere but in that small thatched cottage at the side of the old churchyard. She was an excessively thin old dame, and had the appearance of a walking skeleton in a worn old cotton gown; and her head was like a skull with a thin grey skin drawn tightly over the sharp bones of the face, with pale-coloured living eyes in {292} the sockets. Her scanty grey hair was gathered in a net worn tightly on her head like a skull-cap. The old women in the villages here still keep to this long-vanished fashion. I asked this old woman to tell me about the yellow flowers by the water, and she said that they had always been there. I told her she must be mistaken; and after considering for awhile she assured me that they grew there in abundance when she was quite young. She distinctly remembered that before her marriage--and that was over fifty years ago--she often went down to the stream to gather flowers, and would come in with great handfuls of wild musk. When she had told me this, even before she had finished speaking, I seemed to see two persons before me--the lean old woman with her thin colourless visage, and, coming in from the sunshine, a young woman with rosy face, glossy brown hair and laughing blue eyes, her hands full of brightest yellow wild musk from the stream. And the visionary woman seemed to be alive and real, and the other unsubstantial, a delusion of the mind, a ghost of a woman. But was the old woman right--was the beautiful yellow mimulus, the wild musk or water-buttercup as she called it, which our botanists refuse to admit into their works intended for our instruction, or give it only half a dozen dry words--was it a common wild flower on the Hampshire rivers more than half a century ago? {293} [Sidenote: Bird life on the downs]