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The Sergeant was so deeply interested that he held up his hand, and signed to me not to interrupt the discussion, when I came in. As far as I could understand it, the question between them was, whether the white moss rose did, or did not, require to be budded on the dog-rose to make it grow well. Mr. Begbie said, Yes; and Sergeant Cuff said, No. They appealed to me, as hotly as a couple of boys.
He was surrounded by a dozen pairs of little keen eyes from whom Nature had never yet succeeded in hiding her secrets eyes that had waited for and knew the coming up of the earliest flowers; little fingers that had never turned the pages of a text-book, but knew where to scrape away the dead leaves above the first anemone, or had groped painfully among the lifeless branches in forgotten hollows for the shy dog-rose; unguided little feet that had instinctively made their way to remote southern slopes for the first mariposas, or had unerringly threaded the tule-hidden banks of the river for flower-de-luce.
Many curious names have resulted from the prefix pig, as in Sussex, where the bird's-foot trefoil is known as pig's-pettitoes; and in Devonshire the fruit of the dog-rose is pig's-noses. The common cyclamen is sow-head, and a popular name for the Sonchus oleraceus is sow-thistle.
As we brushed through them, the gummy leaves of a cistus stuck to the clothes; and with its small white flower and yellow heart, stood for our English dog-rose. In place of heather, we had myrtle and lentisque with leaves somewhat similar. That large bulb with long flat leaves? Do not touch it if your hands are cut; the Arabs use it as blisters for their horses. Is that the same sort?
Where the water was shallow was many a broad patch of blooming ranunculus; so that it seemed as if the fairies had been holding a great battle of white flowers upon the river. We glided by the side of meadows where all the waving grass was full of sunshine. On the bank stood purple torches of dame's violet, and the dog-rose climbing upon the guelder rose was pictured with it in the water.
A low wall surrounded a patch of garden-ground to the rear, one corner of it grotesquely adorned with a bower all bedraggled with rains, yet with the red berry of the dog-rose gleaming in the rusty leafage like grapes of fire. He passed through the little garden and up to the door.
The fact of a plant of this genus being as common on the plains of Bengal as a dog-rose is in England, and associated with cocoa-nuts, palms, mangos, plantains, and banyans, has never yet attracted the attention of botanists, though the species was described by Roxburgh.
And after tea the taxicab from the junction came for him and he vanished, and was last seen as a waving hat receding along the top of the dog-rose hedge that ran beyond the hockey field towards the village. "He will see Germany long before I shall," said Herr Heinrich with a gust of nostalgia. "I wish almost I had not agreed to go to Boulogne."
These are the humours of criticism. But, apart from these, a naturalist is at once aware that Milton had neither the eye nor the ear of a naturalist. At no time, even before his loss of sight, was he an exact observer of natural objects. It may be that he knew a skylark from a redbreast, and did not confound the dog-rose with the honeysuckle.
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