Black and White
The salvation of the land is the peat. It is of the best quality; and peat, like coal, is usually good if it is black and poor if it is brown. The surface is compact of peat in spite of centuries of digging, and the walls of the peat-hags are as black as the walls of a coal mine. Peat is heaped in great stacks by the side of the roads and sometimes narrows the road uncomfortably and overflows into it. The blackness of the surface from which the peat has been dug is strangely relieved at the moment by the quantity of cotton grass. The long white cotton threads that are the wings of the seed seem to be particularly successful in depositing the seed in their hollows, which are sometimes altogether beflagged with the streamers. These are as pure a white as the flowers of the thrift that decorate the (often at an.inch or two above the soil) yet barrener dunes on the West coast of England. How little land or even stone is without its favourite plant ! For example, I found thrift in flower in the midst of the barest of rocks on the most exposed of headlands * * * *
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