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Updated: June 20, 2025
Dusautoy would have had less satisfaction in the growing intimacy between the lads, had he known that it had been cemented by inveigling poor Mr. Hope into a marsh in search of cotton-grass, which, at Gilbert's instigation, Algernon avouched to be a new sort of Indian corn, grown in Italy for feeding silkworms. An intimacy there was, rather from constant intercourse than from positive liking.
Phoebe hesitated, and then some instinct, finer than her comprehension of it, prompted her to a refusal, and the cotton-grass was left to swing its gossamer globes of light till the sun should have dipped below the rim of the moor.
Here the babies of the stone-folk, as the boys and girls to-day, stained their little mouths and ringers with fruit of briar and whortle; the ling bloomed then as now; the cotton-grass danced its tattered plume; the sphagnum mosses opened emerald-green eyes in marsh and quaking bog; and hoary granite scattered every ravine and desert valley.
Reynard is making for Coombes's Wood, but the earths were all stopped this morning at four o'clock; so away he speeds again, leaving the rectory and its lovely meadows and the dear old church below us away past the bogs where the cotton-grass and the flycatcher, the blue gentian and the yellow asphodel, grow among the treacherous tussocks away to Eversley Wood.
These alternated with stretches of yellow gorse and brown heather, sheets of cotton-grass, and pools of white crowfoot, and all the vegetation of a mountain side, only that the mountain was not there. The brothers looked with eyes untaught to care for beauty, but with a certain love of the home scenes, tempered by youth's impatience for something new.
"All day on the moor will the cotton-grass Weave its white, long bands together; And softly the snake and the adder pass Through the stems of the tufted heather. "On swinging tussock the lapwing leaps, Lark's note above plover's swelling, As the crook-backed cotter in silence creeps From his lonely moorland dwelling." Gradually, as the years passed, things looked worse and worse for the wood.
A few forlorn tufts of cotton-grass still blew out in the languid breeze and the yellow stars of the cinquefoil shone from the moss, but disfigured by the dozens of evil-looking black slugs, three or four inches long, that lay motionless all over the marsh.
In other parts, the Shaw is quite clear of its bosky undergrowth, and clothed only with large beds of feathery fern, or carpets of flowers, primroses, orchises, cowslips, ground-ivy, crane's-bill, cotton-grass, Solomon's seal, and forget-me-not, crowded together with a profusion and brilliancy of colour, such as I have rarely seen equalled even in a garden.
I must have toiled for many miles in this dreary fashion, sometimes coming upon shallower mud and sometimes upon deeper, but never making my way on to the dry, when I perceived through the gloom something which turned my heart even heavier than it had been before. This was a curious clump of some whitish shrub cotton-grass of a flowering variety which glimmered suddenly before me in the darkness.
The cuckoos call in constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble brightness of the season. On the margin of the leafy pools the summer swallows skim the stream. Swift horses seek the pools. The heath spreads out its long hair. The white, gentle cotton-grass grows. The sea is lulled to rest. Flowers cover the earth."
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