On the great hills along the eastern side of the county, and especially in the moorland parts, the flora is meagre in the extreme. Acres innumerable produce little besides heather and whortle-berry. When the latter decreases, it is to make room for the empetrum, or the Vitis Idæa, "the grape of Mount Ida"--a name enough in itself to fling poetry over the solitude. Harsh and wiry grasses and obdurate rushes fill the interspaces, except where green with the hard-fern. Occasionally, as upon Foledge, the parsley-fern and the club-moss tell of the altitude, as upon Pendle the pinguicula and the cloud-berry. The hills behind Grange are in part densely covered with juniper, and the characteristic grass is the beautiful blue sesleria, the colour contrasting singularly with that of the hay-field grasses. The choicest of the English green-flowered plants, the trulove, _Paris quadrifolia_, is plentiful in the woods close by, and extends to those upon the banks of the Duddon. Everywhere north of Morecambe Bay, as these names go far to indicate, the flora is more diversified than to the south; here, too, particular kinds of flowers occur in far greater plenty. At Grange the meadows teem with cowslips, in many parts of Lancashire almost unknown. Crimson orchises--Ophelia's "long-purples," the tway-blade, the fly-orchis, the Lady's tresses, the butterfly-orchis, that smells only after twilight, add their charms to this beautiful neighbourhood, which, save for Birkdale, would seem the Lancashire orchids' patrimony. The total number of orchideous plants occurring wild in the county is fourteen; and of these Birkdale lays very special claim to two--the marsh epipactis and the _Orchis latifolia_. In the moist hollows among the sand-hills, called the "slacks," they grow in profusion, occurring also in similar habitats beyond the Ribble. The abundance is easily accounted for; the seeds of the orchids, of every kind, are innumerable as the motes that glisten i' the sunbeam, and when discharged, the wind scatters them in all directions. The orchids' Birkdale home is that also of the parnassia, which springs up less frequently alone than in clusters of from six or eight to twenty or thirty. Here, too, grows that particular form of the pyrola, hitherto unnoticed elsewhere, which counts as the Lancashire botanical specialty, looking when in bloom like the lily of the valley, though different in leaf, and emulating not only the fashion but the odour. It would much better deserve the epithet of "Lancashire" than the asphodel so called, for the latter is found in bogs wherever they occur. Never mind; it is more than enough that there is whisper in it of the "yellow meads," and that in high summer it shows its bright gold, arriving just when the cotton-grass is beginning to waft away, and the sundews are displaying their diamonds, albeit so treacherously, for in another week or two every leaf will be dotted with corpses. No little creature of tender wing ever touches a