The haunts of the Alpine meadow-rue (_thalictrum alpinum_) are similar to those of the spiderwort; and a most elegant little plant it is, its gracefully drooping terminal cluster of small yellowish flowers being borne on a simple naked stem, whereas its less aristocratic relative, the smaller meadow-rue (_t. collinum_), which is much commoner on these rocks, is bushier and more branched. I had many disappointments, before I rightly apprehended the true Alpine species; once distinguished, it cannot again be mistaken. It was to a chance meeting in Ogwen Cottage, at the foot of Cwm Idwal, with Dr. Lloyd Williams, a skilled botanist who had brought a party of friends to visit the home of the _Lloydia_, that I owed my introduction to another very beautiful inhabitant of those heights, the white mountain-avens, known to rock-gardeners as _dryas octopetala_. Happy is the flower-gazer who has looked on the galaxy, the "milky way," of those fair mountain nymphs--for the plant is in truth an oread rather than a dryad--where they shed their lustre from certain favoured ledges in a spot which it is safer to leave unspecified. I must have passed close to the place many scores of times, in the forty or more years during which I had known the mountain; yet never till then did I become aware of the treasure that was enshrined in it! But of all the glories of Cwm Idwal--rarities apart--the greatest, when the summer is at its prime, is the array of globe-flowers. This splendid buttercup usually haunts the banks of mountain streams, or the sides of damp woods, in the West country and the North; its range is given in the _Flora of the Lake District_ as not rising above nine hundred feet; but in Snowdonia, not content to dwell with its cousins the kingcups and spearworts in the upland valleys, it aspires to a far more romantic station, and is seen blooming in profusion at twice and almost three times that height on the most precipitous rock-ledges.[21] One may gaze by the hour, enraptured, and never weary of the sight. [Footnote 21: In the Cairngorm mountains, the globe-flower ascends to a height of 3,000 feet (see Mr. Seton Gordon's _Wanderings of a Naturalist_); in the Alps to 8,000.] I have by no means exhausted the list of notable Snowdonian flowers that are native in the two localities of which I have spoken, or in a few other spots that are similarly favoured by geological conditions: the sea-plantain, the mountain-cudweed, the stone-bramble, the queer little whitlow-grass with twisted pods (_draba incana_), its still rarer congener the Alpine rock-cress, and the _Saussurea_, or Alpine saw-wort--all these, and more, are to be found there by the pilgrim who devotedly searches the scriptures of the hills. But of the _Saussurea_ some mention will have to be made in the next chapter; for it is now time to turn from Cambria to Cumbria, from the "cwms" and "cribs" of Snowdon to the "coves" and "edges" of Helvellyn. XXIV COVES OF HELVELLYN