294 EARLY REMINISCENCES hairbell from the hair-like stalk that sustains the flower. It is a mistake to call it a bluebell. The campanula rotundiflora belongs to the heaths and braes, and the true bluebell to the woods. Twenty-four years ago I met my loved flower again in Wales, and welcomed it as a dear lost friend. I carried away a basket load of roots, and planted them where I thought they would flourish, on the lime-quarry " ramps." They have not flowered, they are all dead. I wonder whether, if planted on my grave, they would flourish there ? I should joy to have the little bells dancing in the wind, and lulling me in my last sleep. I shall never see a harebell again in this life. But, just as we look to meet friends and relatives hereafter, so do we look to happy meetings in the same Land of Light, with our beloved flowers. And how, to many of us, our gardens, our meadows, our hedgerows, our woodlands and moors teem with these loved friends. Eh Men ! mes amis, au revoir! Et toi, ma chere Clochette ! I enjoyed at Hurstpierpoint, from the terrace in front of the college, a wide expanse of horizon. To the south indeed rose the Downs, but there was no bar to the east or west. Later I had a grand prospect at Mersea to the south over the German Ocean, but nowhere else, as at Hurst, so unbounded a view of the rising and the setting sun. At Lew, the house, lying in a valley and facing south, has before it a wooded range of hill some 600 ft. above the sea. Shafts of golden light shoot from the setting sun and kindle the boles of the Scotch pines, grouped in the middle distance, but from the terrace at Lew the decease of the orb of day is veiled by trees. What my mother felt at Bratton I have felt at Lew, that a bounded horizon is oppressive. At Hurst, and later at Mersea, the day smote straight in at the windows, whereas in a town and in a valley, it comes down on one from above. And sky landscape is stimulating to thought, and wide prospects draw the soul out of immediateness, if I may coin the word. Those who have been to the Siberian Steppes, the Campo of the Argentines, or the sandy deserts of Africa and Syria, speak of the delight derived from the prospect of vast space, and of the home-sickness that befalls the inhabitants of a plain when away from these level tracts. I can well understand it. The imagination is checked by the houses on the opposite side of the street
