{31} The above lists are, of course, only selections. Indeed, on the occasion to which the last list refers, one of the party produced a series of water-colour paintings of wild flowers which are found in the neighbourhood, beautifully executed by Dr. Burgess, of Spilsby, and numbering about 500. {32} In speaking of the silene quinque vulneralis, on a previous page, I said that there was no absolute reason why it should not re-appear in the garden of the Victoria Hotel. The holy thistle is a case in point. Several years ago seeing that it was being steadily exterminated, and that the end was inevitably near, the writer transplanted a root to his own garden. It flourished there through two seasons, but was eventually, by mistake, “improved” away, when the garden beds were being dug over. To his surprise, some years after, a vigorous plant of it was found growing in his kitchen garden among the potatoes. Alas! That also has now gone the way of all thistle flesh. {33} “Bage” is an old Lincolnshire word meaning a sod. In the overseer’s accounts of the neighbouring parish of Roughton occurs this entry twice in the year 1707: “2s. 6d. paid for one day’s work of church moor bages”; _i.e._, peat cut for fuel. {34a} The birch trees of the neighbourhood, with their silvery bark and light and elegant foliage have been very much reduced in numbers, as the wood is used for “clogs” in the manufacturing districts of Yorkshire and elsewhere. {34b} There is a “Pyewipe” Inn at Lincoln, and Pyewipe Hall, near Kirton-in-Lindsey. {34c} This may seem to the ordinary uninitiated mind to be a stretch of the imagination; but if we are to believe Mr. Cornish, the old practised gunners on our coasts, who make the cries of our wild fowl a life-long study can almost understand them as well as human speech. See “Animals, their Life and Conversation,” by C. J. Cornish. {34d} They also frequented other moorlands in the north of the county, in the neighbourhood of Market Rasen and Caistor.