tive of the lily of the valley. In similar situations the bilberry also luxuriates. Abundant everywhere on the exposed sides of the hills, it flowers and fruits only in the shelter of the woods or on the shady banks of subalpine streams. Its berries are exceedingly agreeable to the taste, and are largely used in the form of preserves in the Highlands. Blaeberry hunting in July is a favourite pastime among the children; and for days afterwards the persistent stains of the spoil crimson cheeks, lips, and dress. The bog whortleberry is more sparingly distributed, though it is frequent enough on most of the Highland mountains, ascending almost to their summits. The corolla is of a pale rosy colour, and the berry black and juicy, but inferior in flavour to the bilberry. The cowberry ornaments some parts of the Highland mountains, woods, and heaths with its straggling shrubby growth and box-like leaves. It seldom flowers or fruits in this country; but in Norway it bursts into blossom everywhere, and is loaded with pale, flesh-coloured flowers, lighting up the dark pine-woods with its beauty. Next to the bilberry, the cranberry is the most interesting and useful of the Vacciniums. It loves moist situations, and therefore occurs in peat-bogs, with its root immersed in the great spongy cushions of the bog-moss, and its evergreen wiry leaves trailing over them. The flowers are of a lovely rose colour, with a deeply divided corolla and segments bent back in a very singular manner. In this country it is very local and scarce; but in Norway it grows in great profusion on almost every hill; and nothing can equal the luxuriousness of its growth and fruiting in the marshes and steppes in the north of Russia, from which the vast quantities used by our confectioners for tarts are annually imported. Growing abundantly among the heather is the beautiful heathpea, with its bright blue and pink blossom lighting up with a tinge of colour the brown moorland. The long knotted black roots of this plant used to be employed by the Highlanders, under the name of Corrun, when on a journey or a foray, in the absence of food and water, as they have the singular property when chewed of repelling hunger and thirst for a long time. An agreeable fermented liquor was also made with them, tasting somewhat like liquorice; and in a season of scarcity they have been used instead of bread. The juniper forms miniature pine-groves in sheltered places, and yields its berries liberally to give a piquant gin flavour to the old wife's surreptitious bottle of whisky; while the sweet gale or Dutch myrtle, called by the Highlanders roid, perfumes with its strong resinous fragrance the foot that brushes through its beds in the marshes, and gives a similar spice of the hills to the Sunday clothes of the Highland belle, as they are carefully folded with a sprig between each in the "muckle kist." Beneath the shelter of these tiny fruit-trees of the heath there is a dense underwood of minute existences, curious antique forms of vegetable life, performing silently, and all alone and unnoticed, their allotted tasks in the great household of Nature. The little cuplichen reddens by thousands every dry hillock; the reindeer moss whitens the marshes with its coral-like tufts; the long wreaths of the club-moss creep in and out among the heather-roots, like lithe green serpents, sewed to the ground by delicate threads, yet sending up here and there from their hiding-places white two pronged spikes to catch the sunbeams; hard tufts of another species of club-moss which the Highlanders often used as a mordant in fixing the colours of their tartans, occur at frequent intervals; the sphagnum-moss lines the bogs with its great pads of brilliant crimson or green; and the white fork-moss covers the wet tussocks with its pale cushions, into which the foot sinks up to the ankle; and thus you wander on, observing and gathering each new and strange production, until you are lost in admiration of the wealth of beauty and interest scattered in the waste without any human eye to behold it. phys-i-og-no-my, general ap- from the nose." The mucous unnoticed characteristic conspicuous membrane is the interior lin- muckle kist. Large chest. 5. HUMAN INTEREST. NOR is the moorland altogether destitute of human interest. Far up in some lonely corrie may be seen the ruins of rude sheilings surrounded by soft patches of verdure, on which the heather has not intruded for centuries. To these Highland chalets the wives and daughters of the crofters used to come up from the valley every summer with their cattle and dairy utensils, and spend three or four months in making cheese and butter for the market, or for home consumption during the winter, as is the custom still in some secluded districts of Norway and the Swiss alps. The Gaelic songs are full of beautiful allusions to the incidents of this primitive pastoral life; and many fresh and interesting materials for poetry or fiction might be gleaned from this source by those who have exhausted every other field. Farther down the hill, though still among the moorlands, there are other ruins of cottages and farmsteads, the effects of those extensive "clearings" which took place forty or fifty years ago in the great Highland properties. Scores of such "larichken," as they are called, with the rank nettle growing round the hearthstone, and surrounded by traces of cultivation, may be seen in places where sheep and deer now feed, undisturbed by the presence of man. The situation of these ruins is often exceedingly picturesque; perched under the lee of a gray crag, with a little streamlet murmuring past through the greensward, like the voice of memory informing the solitude, and a single fir-tree bending its gnarled branches over the roofless walls, its scaly trunk gleaming red against the sunset, enhancing instead of relieving the desolation of the scene. còr-rie, sheltered hollow on a REV. H. MACMILLAN. chal-et (shal-ă), Swiss cottage. cròft-er, tenant of a croft, or small piece of cultivated land. |