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Here grow the tall foxgloves, bending a purple head in the heat of noon; here the great bells of the convolvulus hang thick from lofty hedges, massing their pink and white against dark green leafage; here amid shadowed undergrowth trail the long fronds of lustrous hartstongue; wherever the eye falls, profusion of summer's glory.
He called to mind the sensuous melancholy of the birches, the foxgloves, the hedgerows smothered in dog-roses; he remembered the nights, full of fairy-like suggestion and odours of earth and budding leaves those wonderful nights with their silvery radiance, calm and benignant, streaming upwards form the luminous North.
On this knoll grew some stunted trees, gnarled and old, with very mossy stems. There was moss on the stones too, and between them grew lovely harebells, and at the foot of the knoll there were always in the season tall foxgloves, which had imparted a certain fear to the spot in my fancy. For there they call them Dead Man's Bells, and I thought there was a murdered man buried somewhere thereabout.
Just for fun, one of the little mermaids used to draw some bag-like seaweed over her hands, to see how such things looked. One day, while sunning themselves in the grass on the island, one of their number found a bush on which foxgloves grew. Plucking these, she covered each one of her fingers with a red flower. Then, flopping over to the other girls, she held up her gloved hands.
There is a smooth dry brae opposite to Logie Cumming, called 'Braigh Choilich-Choille, great part of the slope of which is covered with a growth of brackens from five to six feet high, mixed with large masses of foxgloves, of such luxuriance that the stems sometimes rise five from a single root, and more than seven feet in height, of which there is often an extent of five feet of blossoms, loaded with a succession of magnificent bells.
The ground was a perfectly beautiful carpet of flowers wild hyacinths, purple foxgloves, pretty, pale strawberry blossoms all grew there. The hedges were one mass of wild roses and woodbine; the tall elm trees that ran along the lane met shadily overhead; the banks on either side were radiant in different colored mosses; huge ferns surrounded the roots of the trees.
All love and all success were pressed into a hair's-breadth, and yet the target was never missed. "You shall go down to the House by the Sea," said Jay. "You shall go when the moon is next full over the sea that drowned our house. You shall come from the east, along the rocky path, as you used to come, between the foxgloves; you shall play at being a god, coming between the stars and the sea.
I could not go so far alone, but had frequent opportunities of walking there and gathering ferns, foxgloves, and primroses, which grew on the mossy banks of a little stream that ran into the sea. The bed of this stream or burn was thickly covered with the freshwater mussel, which I knew often contained pearls, but I did not like to kill the creatures to get the pearls.
But he could not look back at her. She took his hand and kissed it, knowing he was thinking of his own youngest child. The way home lay across country, through deep little lanes where the late foxgloves sat seriously, like sad hounds; over open downlands, rough with gorse and ling, and through pocketed hollows of bracken and trees. They came to a small Roman Catholic church in the fields.
One of them, over which she lingered, was of a charming, old-fashioned garden spattered with sunlight, and shut out from the world by a high brick wall. Behind the wall, again, were the dense masses of the trees, and at the end of a path between nodding foxgloves and Canterbury bells, in a curved recess, a stone seat. She turned her face. His was at her shoulder.
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