flowers that grow in our roadside ditches and within reach of the road is amazing when one begins to reckon them. Here the steep grassy bank is gorgeous with rose-campion and with the purple and gold of the vetches, and all the air is sweet with the perfume of wild mustard, which with the pale yellow of its blossoms almost hides the green in that field of springing barley. This wet meadow, on either hand all aglow with the pink blossoms of the ragged robin, a little earlier in the year had its wide and shallow ditches glorified by the broad green leaves and exquisite feathery blooms of the bog-bean, while its drier grounds were starred with the pale cups of grass of Parnassus. In spring the vernal squills shone on yonder hillocks with a blue glory as of the sea in summer. On this long flat stretch of peat-bog these are not untimely snowdrifts but nodding patches of cotton-grass. In autumn, when a strong wind blows from that quarter, all the road will be strewn with the silvery, silken down that makes so brave a show among the purple heather of the bog. Later still in the year the same bog will glow ruddy as with a perpetual sunset, when the long, coarse grass reddens. Passing this way on some gray afternoon the wayfarer will find it hard to believe that the “charmed sunset” has not suddenly shone out through the clouds “low adown in the red west.” And the peat-moss on which the road is built has other glories—green moss and moss as red as blood, fairy cups of silver lichen with scarlet rims, and long reaches of bog-asphodel, shining like cloth-of-gold and sweetening the winds with their faint, delicate perfume. Here, where our road runs on a firmer foundation, grow the wild willows, all low-growing and all adding a beauty to the year in their catkins. When the daisies have hardly ventured to thrust their heads into a cold world the catkins gleam in silky silver, changing as the days lengthen to yellow gold. Later on some of them are covered with an exquisite white down which floats their seeds about the land. The little burns which our road bridges ripple and chatter through miniature forests of ferns and meadow-sweet, the foxglove shakes its bells above the splendour of the gorse, and the yellow iris hides the young wild-duck that are making their way by ditch and brooklet to the sea. These are but a few of the flowers with which the road garlands and bedecks herself to welcome the little peoples who love her.