I was drawing towards home, after a jaunt of an hour or two, when I came suddenly into a sheltered and sunny nook, where a bed of the early saxifrage was already in full bloom, while a most exquisite little bee-fly of a beautiful shade of warm brown was hovering over it, draining the tiny, gold-lined chalices, one by one, with its long proboscis, which looked precisely like the bill of a humming-bird.

On the cliffs above my pasture are masses of moss, holding, as a pincushion holds a breastpin, little early saxifrage plants.