If you went close to these trailing brambles, you would find that each cluster of bloom had a bee or two at work on it. There are plenty of the bees of commerce there, dressed in homespun garb of unassuming grey or brown, quite suitable for the work they have to do—make honey for the humble cottagers that dwell in the village nestling among the trees down yonder. But besides these, there are great gaudy bees that go droning from blossom to blossom, clad in velvet, with stripes of orange, white, or red, each arrayed in his own tartan, one might say, each belonging to his own clan or ilk. Here is a great towering thistle—emblem of Scotland, pride of her sons. How beautiful the broad mauve-coloured, thorn-protected flowers are, and on each of them is one of the aforesaid big tartan bees, and on some there are two revelling in the nectar there distilled! Now do those Scottish thistles exude a kind of whisky, I wonder, or rather a kind of Athole brose (a mixture of honey and whisky). Whether they do or not, one thing must be patent to the eyes of all observers—those tartan bees do positively become intoxicated on those Scottish thistle-tops; from other flowers they gather honey in quite a business sort of a way, but once they alight upon the thistle they are down for the day. They soon become so drowsy that they don’t care to move, and if you go near them they hold up their forelegs and shako them at you in a deprecating sort of a way.
“For goodness’ sake,” they seem to say, “don’t come here to disturb us; go away and look after your business, if you happen to have any, only don’t come here.”
If you are an early bird, you may find some of those bees asleep on the thistle-tops at six o’clock in the morning, the down on their backs all bedraggled, and dew on their wings, evidence enough that they have not been home at all, and mean to make another day of it.
Shrub-like oaks, stunted willows, and dark-berried elders also grow on the banks among the furze and the bramble, and here and there a patch of purple heath.
Between the little hills the ground is level, but carpeted over with grass and moss, and a profusion of dwarfed wild flowers of every tint and colour under the sun.
The wood itself is of fir and larch pine, with here and there a gigantic and widely spreading oak. There are dark spruce thickets too, much frequented by wood-pigeons—I can hear their mournful croodling now—and there are darker thickets still, where the brown owl sits blinking and nodding all day long, till gloaming and starlight send him out, with the bat, to see after supper.
It is under the shadow of a splendid oak-tree, which overhangs a portion of my glade, that I mostly write, and under it my little tent is pitched, the shelter of which I only court when a shower comes on, being, like every other wild creature, a thorough believer in the benefits of a life spent in the fresh open air.
Yonder hangs a hammock in which, when tired, I may lounge with a book, or, soothed by the sweet breath of the pine-trees, and lulled by the whisper of wind and leaf, sleep.
But when work is done, hammock, tent and all are packed upon or behind my tricycle, which, like a patient steed, stands there waiting to bear me to my home in the valley.
My woodland study is fully five-hundred feet above the level of the sea, and yet it is easy to see from the size, shape and surface of the pebbles all around me, that this glade was once upon a time a portion of the ocean’s bed; that glass-green waves once rippled over those banks where the furze now grows; that congers and flat fish once wriggled over the gravel where those thistles are blooming; and that thorny-backed crabs used to lie perdu in the holes where dormice now sleep in winter.