On going up to London I carried it with me in a small box: there in a dark room it shone once more, but the light was now much fainter, and on the following evening there was no light. For some days I tried, by moistening it, by putting it out {79} in the sun and wind, and in other ways, to bring back the light, but did not succeed; and, convinced at length that it would shine no more, I had the feeling that life had at last gone out of that dry, dusty fragment. The little summer tragedies in Nature which we see or notice are very few--not one in a thousand of those that actually take place about us in a spot like this, teeming with midsummer life. A second one, which impressed me at the time, had for its scene a spot not more than eight minutes' walk from that forest gate where the stag-beetle, too long in cooling his wrath, had been overtaken by so curious a destiny. But before I relate this other tragedy, I must describe the place and some of the creatures I met there. It was a point where heath and wood meet, but do not mingle; where the marshy stream that drains the heath flows down into the wood, and the boggy ground sloping to the water is overgrown with a mixture of plants of different habits--lovers of a dry soil and of a wet--heather and furze, coarse and fine grasses, bracken and bog myrtle; and in the wettest spots there were patches and round masses of rust-red and orange-yellow and pale-grey lichen, and a few fragrant, shining, yellow stars of the bog asphodel, although its flowering season was nearly over. It was a perfect wilderness, as wild a bit of desert as one could wish to be in, where a man could spy all day upon its shy inhabitants, and no one would come and spy upon him. {80} Here, if anywhere, was my exulting thought when I first beheld it, there should be adders for me. There was a snakiness in the very look of the place, and I could almost feel by anticipation the delightful thrill in my nerves invariably experienced at the sight of a serpent. And as I went very cautiously along, wishing for the eyes of a dragon-fly so as to be able to see all round me, a coil of black and yellow caught my sight at a distance of a few yards ahead, and was no sooner seen than gone. The spot from which the shy creature had vanished was a small, circular, natural platform on the edge of the bank, surrounded with grass and herbage, and a little dwarf, ragged furze; the platform was composed of old, dead bracken and dry grass, and had a smooth, flat surface, pressed down as if some creature used it as a sleeping-place. It was, I saw, the favourite sleeping- or basking-place of an adder, and by-and-by, or in a few hours' time, I should be able to get a good view of the creature. Later in the day, on going back to the spot, I did find my adder on its platform, and was able to get within three or four yards, and watch it for some minutes before it slipped gently down the bank and out of sight. [Sidenote: Watching adders]