the oil should be applied by pouring a small quantity into the ear,
exactly in the same manner as in the play the poison is poured into the
ear of the sleeping king. Cures are declared to be effected by this oil
at the present day.

It is procured by skinning the adder, taking the fat, and boiling it;
the result is a clear oil, which never thickens in the coldest weather.
One of these reptiles on being killed and cut open was found to contain
the body of a full-grown toad. The old belief that the young of the
viper enters its mouth for refuge still lingers. The existence of adders
in the woods here seems so undoubted that strangers should be a little
careful if they leave the track. Viper's bugloss, which grows so freely
by the heath, was so called because anciently it was thought to yield an
antidote to the adder's venom.

THE RIVER

There is a slight but perceptible colour in the atmosphere of summer. It
is not visible close at hand, nor always where the light falls
strongest, and if looked at too long it sometimes fades away. But over
gorse and heath, in the warm hollows of wheatfield, and round about the
rising ground there is something more than air alone. It is not mist,
nor the hazy vapour of autumn, nor the blue tints that come over the
distant hills and woods.

As there is a bloom upon the peach and grape, so this is the bloom of
summer. The air is ripe and rich, full of the emanations, the perfume,
from corn and flower and leafy tree. In strictness the term will not, of
course, be accurate, yet by what other word can this appearance in the
atmosphere be described but as a bloom? Upon a still and sunlit summer
afternoon it may be seen over the osier-covered islets in the Thames
immediately above Teddington Lock.

It hovers over the level cornfields that stretch towards Richmond, and
along the ridge of the wooded hills that bound them. The bank by the
towing-path is steep and shadowless, being bare of trees or hedge; but
the grass is pleasant to rest on, and heat is always more supportable
near flowing water. In places the friable earth has crumbled away, and
there, where the soil and the stones are exposed, the stonecrop
flourishes. A narrow footpath on the summit, raised high above the
water, skirts the corn, and is overhung with grass heavily laden by its
own seed.

Sometimes in early June the bright trifolium, drooping with its weight
of flower, brushes against the passer-by--acre after acre