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In July I have a pageant. Foxglove and Eglantine make melodious my woods; Ladies' Slipper gives a golden cope to the hillside, with purple campanula to wind about it like a scarf. After this August, September, October our uplands faint out in semitones: grey scabious, grey harebell, pale bed-straw, white meadowsweet, like the lace of an old lady's cap.
The harebell had always from a child been with me a favourite flower; and the first sight of it in Canada, growing upon that lonely grave, so flooded my soul with remembrances of the past, that, in spite of myself, the tears poured freely from my eyes. There are moments when it is impossible to repress those outgushings of the heart
I am aware that there has been a good deal said in poetry about the fringed gentian and the harebell of rocky districts and waysides, and I know that it is possible for maidens to bloom in very slight soil into a wild-wood grace and beauty; yet, the world through, they lack that wealth of charms, that tropic affluence of both person and mind, which higher and more stimulating culture brings, the passion as well as the soul glowing in the Cloth-of-Gold rose.
All is so curiously changed the dwarf birch bleeds redly against the grey stones, a harebell here and there shows among the heather, swaying and whispering a little song: sh! But high above all hovers an eagle with outstretched neck, on his way to the inland ridges. And the evening comes; I lay my drill and my hammer in under the rock and stop to rest. All things are glooming now.
"Her feet have touched the meadows, and left the daisies rosy." You think that only a lover's fancy; false and vain! How if it could be true? You think this also, perhaps, only a poet's fancy "Even the light harebell raised its head Elastic from her airy tread." But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does not destroy where she passes.
Each sound and scent plucked at him in passing: the roadside started into detail like the foreground of some minute Dutch painter; every pendent mass of fern, dark dripping rock, late tuft of harebell called out to him: "Look well, for this is your last sight of us!"
The neat drawings with which she illustrated her botany schedules were the admiration of her classmates, though they did not always meet with the appreciation from Miss Harper which they deserved. On one occasion Patty had taken immense trouble to copy a harebell as an example of the order Campanulaceæ.
The harebell appears at about four thousand feet and extends to the summit, dwarfing in stature but maintaining the size of its handsome bells until they seem to be lying loose and detached on the ground as if like snow flowers they had fallen from the sky; and, though frail and delicate-looking, none of its companions is more enduring or rings out the praises of beauty-loving Nature in tones more appreciable to mortals, not forgetting even Cassiope, who also is here, and her companion, Bryanthus, the loveliest and most widely distributed of the alpine shrubs.
Lindsay was knitting, and Uncle Neil was strumming out fragments of old songs on his violin, his stockinged feet comfortable on the damper of the stove. Even Uncle Neil's memory could not produce the Harebell, and Jimmie went rummaging through the book impatiently. "Gavin Grant would tell me if he was here," Jimmie said. "He knows all this stuff off by heart."
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