The Peculiarity May Be A Beauty Of Disposition,
Or Some Virtue Or Rare Mental Quality Which The Others Do Not Possess.
It would perhaps be worth while to form a society to investigate all
these cases of persecution in families, to discover whether or not they
afford any support to the notion of an inherited antagonism of dark and
light races.
The Anthropological, Eugenic and Psychical Research
Societies might consider the suggestion.
XXXI
THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF
(SPRING SADNESS)
On a warm, brilliant morning in late April I paid a visit to a shallow
lakelet or pond five or six acres in extent which I had discovered some
weeks before hidden in a depression in the land, among luxuriant furze,
bramble, and blackthorn bushes. Between the thickets the boggy ground
was everywhere covered with great tussocks of last year's dead and
faded marsh grass - a wet, rough, lonely place where a lover of solitude
need have no fear of being intruded on by a being of his own species,
or even a wandering moorland donkey. On arriving at the pond I was
surprised and delighted to find half the surface covered with a thick
growth of bog-bean just coming into flower. The quaint three-lobed
leaves, shaped like a grebe's foot, were still small, and the
flowerstocks, thick as corn in a field, were crowned with pyramids of
buds, cream and rosy-red like the opening dropwort clusters, and at the
lower end of the spikes were the full-blown singular, snow-white,
cottony flowers - our strange and beautiful water edelweiss.
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