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Le Breton'll tell you when and where to change sides; he knows the river as well as I do. 'That'll do splendidly for the present, Ernest said, looking ahead over his shoulder. 'Mind the flags there; don't go too near the corner. You certainly ought to see these meadows in early spring, when the fritillaries are all out over the spongy places, Miss Oswald.
Then along a road, which might be a Devon one, cut in the hill-side, through authentic "Devonian" slate, where the deep chocolate soil is lodged on the top of the upright strata, and a thick coat of moss and wood sedge clusters about the oak-scrub roots, round which the delicate and rare oak-fern mingles its fronds with great blue campanulas; while the "white admirals" and silver-washed "fritillaries" flit round every bramble bed, and the great "purple emperors" come down to drink in the road puddles, and sit, fearless flashing off their velvet wings a blue as of that empyrean which is "dark by excess of light."
Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St.
Oxford the home of lost causes and impossible ideals; Matthew Arnold's Oxford with its dreaming spires and grey colleges, set in velvet lawns and hidden away among the trees, and about it the beautiful fields, all starred with cowslips and fritillaries where the quiet river winds its way to London and the sea. . . . . The change, Frank, to me was astounding; Trinity was as barbarian as school, with coarseness superadded.
We had passed some red fritillaries and the bee-orchid, a little wild mauve crocus, and some magnificent clumps of white heath, which smelt of almonds and honey; had seen several pairs of stone-chats with their white collars; had sat down for many "breathers"; and at last were at the top, in a wind which flattened every palmetto-bush plumb against the hillside.
Even before I ever set foot in England, how I longed to behold my first cowslip, my first foxglove! And now, I have wandered through the footpaths that run obliquely across English pastures, picking meadowsweet and fritillaries, for half a lifetime, till I have learned by heart every leaf and every petal.
Whenever I think of Mr Arnold it is in those own words of his, which I have quoted already, and which I quoted to myself on the hill by Hinksey as I began this little book in the time of fritillaries "Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade"
Among them are purple, yellow, pink, and white primulas, golden potentillas, gentians of deepest azure, delicate anemones, speedwells, fritillaries, oxalis, balsams, and ranunculus. With these plants from the temperate zone are mixed the far outliers of the tropical genera orchids, begonias, and others whose ascent to these high regions has been favoured by the great summer heat and moisture.
The Nymphalidae are a very extensive group, of generally strong-winged and very bright-coloured butterflies, very abundant in the tropics, and represented in our own country by our Fritillaries, our Vanessas, and our Purple-emperor.
In the first of the three tribes, the classic white lily, the plant preferred by the insect, takes the chief place; next come the other lilies and the fritillaries, a diet almost as much sought after; and lastly the tulips, which the season is too far advanced to allow me to submit for the approval of the Crioceris. The third tribe had a great surprise in store for me.
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