A Western Haunt It is different in the West. On
the way to the most lonely farmhouse I ever visited—no road even approaches it—I walked through a meadow dotted with Lent lilies that cer- tainly looked as natural as possible. They were not massed, as in Hertfordshire paddocks, but scattered widely. This was alongside a small bright stream running at the foot of the Black Mountains on the Herefordshire side. I know one place (in Huntingdonshire) where the double daffodil grows in apparent wildness. It is a- little earlier than the Lent lily and multiplies freely. This colony must- of course have been planted there. The county is full of empty spaces that were once the gardens or purlieus of great houses ; for Huntingdon, like Hereford, being agricultural, has been losing population for generations, indeed probably for centuries. The glorious churches stand there in an isolation only less dramatic than the statue of Osymandias.
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