d by time. The three-pronged fork,
therefore, the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such a
soil as this, has entered here; and I am sorry, for the primitive
vegetation has disappeared. No more thyme, no more lavender, no more
clumps of kermes-oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we
step by lengthening our stride a little. As these plants, especially
the first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a
spoil to forage, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground whence
they were driven by the fork.

What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that is
first dug up and then left for a time to its own resources. We have, in
the first rank, the couch-grass, that execrable weed which three years
of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating. Next, in
respect of number, come the centauries, grim-looking one and all,
bristling with prickles or starry halberds. They are the
yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain centaury, the star-thistle and
the rough centaury: the first predominates. Here and there, amid their
inextricable confusion, stands, like a chandelier with spreading orange
flowers for lights, the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, whose spikes are
strong as nails. Above it towers the Illyrian cotton-thistle, whose
straight and solitary stalk soars to a height of three to six feet and
ends in large pink tufts. Its armour hardly yields before that of the
oyster-plant. Nor must we forget the lesser thistle-tribe, with, first
of all, the prickly or "cruel" thistle, which is so well armed that the
plant-collector knows not where to grasp it; next, the spear-thistle,
with its ample foliage, ending each of its veins with a spear-head;
lastly, the black knap-weed, which gathers itself into a spiky knot. In
among these, in long lines armed with hooks, the shoots of the blue
dewberry creep along the ground. To visit the prickly thicket when the
Wasp goes foraging, you must wear boots that come to mid-leg or else
resign yourself to a smarting in the calves. As long as the ground
retains a few remnants of the vernal rains, this rude vegetation does
not lack a certain charm, when the pyramids of the oyster-plant and the
slender branches of the cotton-thistle rise above the wide carpet
formed by the yellow-flowered centaury's saffron heads; but let the
droughts of summer come and we see but a desolate waste, which the
flame of a match would set ablaze from one end