When summer has come, the flowers of the Downs are legion--yellow bird's-foot trefoil, and horse-shoe vetch; milkwort pink, white, or blue; fragile rock-rose; graceful dropwort; salad burnet; squinancy-wort, and a hundred more,[7] of which one of the fairest, though commonest, is the trailing silverweed, whose golden petals are in perfect contrast with the frosted silver of the foliage. But the special ornament of these hills, known as "the pride of Sussex," is the round-headed rampion, a small, erect, blue-bonneted flower which is no "roundhead" in the Puritan sense, but rather of the gay company of cavaliers. Abundant along the Downs from Eastbourne to Brighton, and still further to the west, it is a plant of which the eye never tires. [Footnote 7: See the beautiful chapter on "The Living Garment," in Mr. W. H. Hudson's _Nature in Downland_.] But it is the orchids that chiefly draw one's thoughts to Downland when midsummer is approaching. "Have you seen the bee orchis?" is then the question that is asked; and to wander on the lower slopes at that season without seeing the bee orchis would argue a tendency to absent-mindedness. I used to debate with myself whether the likeness to a bee is real or fanciful, till one day, not thinking of orchids at all, I stopped to examine a rather strange-looking bee which I noticed on the grass, and found that the insect was--a flower. That, so far, settled the point; but I still think that the fly orchis is the better imitation of the two.