Mid-April in Snowdonia, when March has been cold and wet, shows scarcely an advance from midwinter as far as the blossoming of flowers is concerned. Down by the coast the land is gay with gorse and primroses, but in the bleak upland dales that radiate from the great mountains hardly a bloom is to be seen; nor do the river banks and marshy pastures as yet show so much as a kingcup, a spearwort, or a celandine. The visitors have come in their multitudes to walk, to climb, to cycle, to motor, to take photographs, or to take fish, as the case may be; but if one of them were to confess that he had come to look for flowers he would indeed surprise the natives--still more if he were to point to the upper ramparts of the mountains, among the rocks and snows and clouds, as the place of his design. Yet it is there that we must climb, if we would see the pride of the purple saxifrage, the earliest of our mountain flowers, blest by botanists with the cumbrous name of _saxifraga oppositifolia_, and often grown by gardeners, who know it as a Swiss immigrant, but not as a British native. A true Alpine, it is not found in this country much below 2,000 feet, and in Switzerland its range is far higher, for it is a neighbour and a lover of the snows. Small and slight as it may seem, when compared with some of its more splendid brethren of the Alps, it has the distinction of a high-bred race, the character of the genuine mountaineer. It is a wearer of the purple, in deed as well as in name. But our approach to the home of the saxifrage is not to be accomplished without toil, in weather which is a succession of boisterous squalls. Under such a gale we have literally to push our way in a five-mile walk to the foot of the hills, and as we climb higher and higher up the slopes we have a ceaselesstussle with the strong, invisible foe who buffets us from every side in turn, while he hisses against the sharp edges of the crags, or growls with dull subterranean noises under the piles of fallen rocks. As for the streams, they are blown visibly out of their steep channels and carried in light spray across the hillside, while sheets of water are lifted from the surface of the lake. Not till we reach the base of the great escarpment which forms the north-east wall of the mountain are we able to draw breath in peace; for there, under the topmost precipices, flecked with patches of snow, is a strange and blissful calm. But now, just when our search begins, the mists, which have long been circling overhead, creep down and fill the upland hollow where we stand, cutting off our view not only of the valley below but of the range of cliffs above, and confining us in a sequestered cloudland of our own. Still climbing along a line of snowdrifts which follows a ridge of rocks, and which serves at once as a convenient route for an ascent and a safe guide for a return, we scan the likely-looking corners and crevices for the object of our pilgrimage. At first in vain;