It was under the Hawthorn bushes on the Heath that Gerard found lilies of the valley growing. I remember its coverts of swarthy furze, twice yearly glorified with golden blossoms, and how on one of these occasions, when every hillock was ablaze with its brightness, Frederika Bremer, whom her friend Mary Howitt had brought with her to the Heath, burst into tears at the first sight of the floral splendour. Her great countryman, Linnæus, is said to have fallen on his knees and thanked God for the sight. It was on a gorse bush on North End Hill that I first found dodder, ‘like a red harp string winding about it.’ Black alders grew on the margin of the Leg of Mutton Pond, and there used to be wide spaces covered with the creeping willow, and great beds of close-growing whortleberry, which turns red in autumn, and dyed portions of the Upper Heath at that season with its crimson leaves; and upon North End Hill, breast-high coverts of branching ling, with ferns of other species, besides the common _Lastrea felix mas_, and _Athyrium felix femina_. The vari-coloured clay and sand and gravel that overlies the Heath were then the cause of very picturesque effects. The deep orange and yellows of the gravel-pits were contrasted by the glistering hollows scooped in the hillside beyond Jack Straw’s Castle, where brown gipsies dug the ‘lily-white sand’ with which they supplied London and other housewives for domestic purposes; while in various places there cropped up little hillocks, patched with blue and yellow and ferruginous brown clay, occasionally verging to red, dashing in bits of colour in the landscape with charming pictorial effect. The very irregularity of the surface made one of its chiefest charms, and the wide beds of treacherous sphagnum bordering the old watercourse that drained into the deep-set, sullen-looking Leg of Mutton Pond were full of interest for the botanist. There grew, with their roots in the stream, clusters of turquoise-blue forget-me-nots, and the pretty yellow pimpernel, the ‘creeping Jenny’ of the London area and attic, with purple brook-lime, and pink ragged-robin with torn petals, between groups of straight brown rushes, and beds of flags, and water-mint. The silken flocks of the greater cotton-grass that lie before me grew there once, as did the little red-leaved _Rosa solis_ or sundew, with its crook-shaped flower-scape, and atomic insect remains still held in its hinged leaves; and this brown bit of dried vegetation, a specimen of one of the loveliest of wild flowers, ‘buck-bean,’ with its curiously-feathered corolla, and these unfaded rosy flowers of bog-pimpernel, looking so large by comparison with the slender stems and tiny leaves set in couplets on them—all lived upon those pale-green sphagnum beds.