Our house was on the Undercliff; behind it, the cliff rose steeply to the Folkestone Leas; below, a garden descended in terraces to the beach. The house from the road, presented an undistinguished facade of grey cement; at the back, however (on the seaward facing side), it was faced with white stucco, and the windows were fitted with green persiennes, giving to the house an oddly Mediterranean air. The tamarisks in the garden (and an occasional stone-pine) added to this illusion of meridional gaiety. Had I but known it, the rest of the flora, too, provided curious parallels with that of the Mediterranean seaboard. Stationed at Ancona during the War, I was repeatedly struck by the number of plants which I remembered as growing at Sandgate: Horned Poppy, Bristly Ox-tongue, Tree-Mallow, Henbane, (The maritime flora is, in fact, singularly uniform from Northern to Southern Europe.) Walking on the cliffs by the Adriatic, I might have fancied myself back at Sandgate; till the scattered stars of pink anemones, or a glimpse of an outlying cornfield carpeted with wild red tulips, recalled me to a sense of reality.

One summer - I think it was 1916 - a miracle occurred; the cliffs above our house were carpeted, in July, with the brilliant blue spikes of Viper's Bugloss. The plant was common enough on the cliffs, but had never occurred in anything like such quantity; nor has it ever done so since. The other day, travelling up by the Portsmouth line from Petersfield, I saw near Liphook, for only the second time in my life, the miracle repeated; a field covered, as thickly as if with bluebells, by that noble and stately flower. The blue is of a brighter shade than that of bluebells; the the July sun it seems positively to sizzle and splutter, like a blue Bengal light.