COUNTRY LIFE
LOOKING at the surrounding countryside, with so many bare hills and slopes where nothing but heather grows, one might think that the woods have always been confined to the sides of the valleys where oak and. ash cling to the slopes and an underbrush of hazel and thorn lives on the good rich earth, but up on the hill, among the heather and in the forest of bracken and fern, one discovers the stumps of old trees and here and there a trunk of a rotting conifer, mouldering to become part of the black earth. In the depressions in the hills the peat is deep and on the wind-beaten ridges it is thin, but everywhere the ground is sour. When the weather has been wet, the boggy patches give off a gas that the schoolboy remembers as " bad-egg " gas, sulphuretted hydrogen. Here moss grows and the dead stems of heather are coated with lichen. The pools of water reflect the passing clouds. No creature drinks of this water that has the shade of diluted sulphuric acid. Now and then the pool bubbles and a fragment of moss rises slowly to the surface, but, like the countenance of the hill and the bracken-covered brow, the pool looks lifeless and unfertile where once its life, in the shelter of trees, was rich and its water sweet.
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