with a hat and boots and a certain suggestion of leg. And
so they pass and are gone.

Rising, the amateur nature-lover finds he has been reclining on a
puff-ball. These puff-balls are certainly the most remarkable example of
adaptation to circumstances known to English botanists. They grow
abundantly on golf grounds, and are exactly like golf-balls in external
appearance. They are, however, Pharisees and whited sepulchres, and
within they are full of a soft mess of a most unpleasant appearance--the
amateur nature-lover has some on him now--which stuff contains the
spores. It is a case of what naturalists call "mimicry"--one of nature's
countless adaptations. The golf-player smites these things with force,
covering himself with ridicule--and spores, and so disseminating this
far-sighted and ingenious fungus far and wide about the links.

The amateur nature-lover passes off the down, and towards Banstead
village. He is on the watch for characteristic objects of the
countryside, and rustling through the leaves beneath a chestnut avenue
he comes upon an old boot. It is a very, very old boot, all its blacking
washed off by the rain, and two spreading chestnut leaves, yellow they
are with blotches of green, with their broad fingers extended, rest upon
it, as if they would protect and altogether cover the poor old boot in
its last resting-place. It is as if Mother Nature, who lost sight of her
product at the tanner's yard, meant to claim her own trampled child
again at last, after all its wanderings. So we go on, noting a sardine
tin gleaming brightly in the amber sunlight, through a hazel hedge, and
presently another old boot. Some hawthorn berries, some hoary clematis
we notice--and then another old boot. Altogether, it may be remarked, in
this walk the amateur nature-lover saw eleven old boots, most of them
dropped in the very sweetest bits of hedge tangle and grassy corner
about Banstead.

It is natural to ask, "Whence come all these old boots?" They are, as
everyone knows, among the commonest objects in a country walk, so
common, indeed, that the professional nature-lover says very little
about them. They cannot grow there, they cannot be dropped from
above--they are distinctly earth-worn boots. I have inquired of my own
domestic people, and caused inquiry to be made in a large number of
households, and there does not appear to be any regular custom of taking
boots away to remote and picturesque spots to abandon them. S