On the slope by the mountain-ashes, where the ridge curves downward into the combe with the plantation of young larch-trees, I met Peter Rashleigh leading his donkey—Arcades ambo. “Jenny looks fat enough, Peter,” I said with a nod as I passed on the narrow footpath; “and yet there isn’t much grass up here for her to feed upon.” “Lard bless your soul, sir,” Peter answered with an expansive smile, “grass ain’t what she wants. It don’t noways agree with her. She’s all the better with bracken and furzen-tops. Furzen-tops is good, like mobled queen.” And I believe he was right, too. Jenny’s ancestors from all time have been unaccustomed to rich meadow-feeding, and when their descendants nowadays are turned out into a field of clover they overeat themselves at once, and suffer agonies of mind from the unexpected repletion.

All the dwellers on our moor, in like manner, are poor relations, so to speak, as the donkey is to the horse. They are losers in the struggle for life, yet not quite hopeless losers; creatures that have adapted themselves to the worst positions, which more favoured and successful races could not endure for a moment. The naked Fuegian picks up a living somehow among snow and ice on barren rocks, where a well-clad European would starve and freeze, finding nothing to subsist upon. Just so on the moor; heather, furze, and bracken eke out a precarious livelihood on the sandy soil, where grasses and garden flowers die out at once, unless we artificially enrich the earth for them with leaf-mould from the bottoms and good manure from the farmyards.

More than that, you may take it as a general rule that where grass will grow there is no chance for heather. Not that the heather doesn’t like rich soil, and flourish in it amazingly—when it can get it. If you sow it in garden borders, and keep it well weeded, it will thrive apace, as it never throve in its poor native loam, among the stones and rubble. But the weeding is the secret of its success under such conditions. It isn’t that the heather won’t grow in rich soil, any more than that beggars can’t live on pheasant; but grasses and dandelions, daisies and clovers, can easily give it points in such spots, and beat it. In a very few weeks you will find the lowland plants have grown tall and lush, while the poor distanced heather has been overtopped and crowded out by its sturdier competitors. That is the reason why waterside irises, or Alpine gentians, will grow in garden beds under quite different circumstances from those under which we find them in the state of nature; the whole secret lies in the fact that we restrict competition. Cultivation means merely digging out the native herbs, and keeping them out, once ousted, in favour of other plants which we choose to protect against all their rivals. In rich lowland soils the grasses and other soft succulent herbs outgrow such tough shrubs as ling and Scotch heather. But in the poverty-stricken loam of the uplands, the grasses and garden weeds find no food to batten upon; and there the heather, to the manner born, gets at last a fair field and no favour. It is adapted to the moors, as the camel is to the desert; both have been driven to accommodate themselves to a wretched and thirsty environment; but both have made a virtue of necessity, and risen to the occasion with commendable ingenuity.

Everything about the heather shows long-continued adaptation to arid conditions. Its stems are wiry; its leaves are small, very dry, uninviting as foodstuffs, curled under at the edge, and so arranged in every............