The North-Eastern Weekly Gazette. — 1894-08-11 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

THE HEATHER IN BLOOM.  A cloudlivis day goes well enough with the long leagues of heather by the sea; but better is a day when the blithe wind buffets you if you stand at the cliff-edge, and the huge waves are shorn of their white crests and robed in mist. The sky is blue, indeed, and the sun shines warmly if you lie in shelter ;l,iit great white clouds pass overhead, &masoning Ow won sometimes, and sometimes shining, reflected, with a dull silvery lustre. There is salt iii.the clear air; and she cry of the sea-gulls, blown along the wind, seems to come rather from the ghosts of birds long dead, and still haunting these beautiful wild regions, than ; from any that you can see.  It is paining strange that people should be reconciled to the pursuit of common labours in the small grey towns that seem so near as one looks back from the wastelands. Yet their deafness to the call of wind and seA, the invitation of the enquite air, is all to the advantage of those who have heard. One needs to forget that there arc any in the world beyond himself and Mother Nature: Mother Nature, the only comforter of men, who changes not and gives lack the right of sous even to prodigals who have forgotten her in crowded cities, if oalv they will wine back to lier. Nay (or these lines had not been written), even while they dwell content in the far country she calls to them: to that the midnight noise of London is sometimes magically transmuted into the murmur of a quiet and distant sea. Here i, a test of friendship. They are our friends whom we can see acting, cc if in the flesh, when we hear that they have done or suffered certain things. And if they are friends whom one knows truly, then these (hemline regions by the sea are indeed chief of all our friends. If you should go out to-day from the little town, you would find not much to give you pause on your way to the sea. It may be a late yellow-hammer would have its nest in a deep ditch, which by this time is surely thick with hemlock, meadow-sweet, and fluted fig-wort. On the hedges you would find stray poppies and big patches of trefoil, golden-yellow. The pinewood would smell sweetly, and you would lean over its white gate for the sake of the tall tox-giove etanding stately in its; open spaces, where the sunlight lies upon the fern. If you knew the country it is not likely you would go directly for the sea. You would follow a email stream which ruin in the valley behind the cliffs, until you had come to a weed-grown fish-pond. It is ringed about with purple loose-strife inside its edging of reed and sedge, and the water, ruffled by the wind, is blner than the sky. But soon you would go forward, hardly paining where on a certain bank you may always tind white sheepebit, that should be blue. You mount the last elope, wide corn-fields on the one hand, and on the other a scoop shaped valley of meadowland, where the hares love to feed at evening. Presently you erten a stile, and have the waste before you. It is gocd to walk straight forward to the cliffs, and have the plain of the sea reveal itself inch by Ueda, until you are looking down on the turmoil of the waves among the tumbled rucks. Then you must choose if you will go east or west. Westward a luminous haze sweeps up from the sea over the face of the cliff, and the mills and the jaekdaws flying in it shine dazzlingly. But to go eastward is the wiser plan, for only thus can you scam the heather with eeeing eyes. Here end there a few late orchids of palest lilac are scattered among it, and there are pat..hm of golden summer Kenn. Where the taller , growths have been burned the heather grows in I tiny buttonholes (to speak berbarously), and a score of insignificant flowers are just as notable. But , for the most part these wastes belong wholly to the heather; and the runes of it, as the wind goes gintily inland, deadens the sound of the sea, union you stand at the very edge of the cliff. In narrow trodden pathways great bumble-bees sprawl on the short grain, drunken to utter helplessness with the poisoned honey of hawkweed and of rag. wort—the yellow "harvest-weed." To discover everything in a given place, it is usually neceseary only to be on the alert for one. And what better object for the eyes than the white heather, which brings good luck? Nor is it altogether easy to discover, unless you be of those who give the name to white liitg—too common here for notice. 'I he white tell-heather iii more modest than the violet., and the biggest spray is usually brought to light only when you have eseaved to gather its insignificant visible part. A pleasant occupation is to collect a series of sprays —white, stained-white, rose-colour, puce, and pirole—and wonder at the folly of scientific botanists, who give them but one name between them. And so at last you come to the marvellous valley which retreats from the cliffs at their highest point. There are many places where you may lie on cushioned heather. A stream runs in the bed of the valley ; and as it prepares to fall the remaining eighty feet to the beach, the winds get under it, and fling it back into the air, a pillow of minhow-tinted mist, You look out on the infinite sea betwixt the steep sides of the valley. And it were easy to fancy that you had come to the edge of the world, and that the blue sea, with the sun on it, was the Beyond you must presently explore.— The Speaker.  Mr John Lancaster Gough Mowat, senior bursar and librarian at Pembroke College, committed suicide during Monday night by hanging himself. The sad event has created a profound sensation at Oxford. Mr Mowat had just returned from a holiday exprinsly to entertain a large company in connection with the meeting of the British Association. Deceased before committing suicide burnt a large quantity of his papery. "Sari AM TEI BANK Or ENoLAN o."—The phrse familiar enoicrh, and in spite of reeent criticisms of our great nationalist itiltlo/1, MOOCCI Us waled IV perfectly con• tent if all our private victims were "a safe as the Rank 'of Enghs.d.,, Well, then, sou man look after your fine.. rial soundness. unto, you ; and if you se not quite