CONTRAST IN SEASONS

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3714, 12 October 1926, Page 7

CONTRAST IN SEASONS

A TRAVELLER'S OBSERVATIONS August is wet, generally, in Scotland, hut when you are in Scotland von won’t mind rain, or had better nor. . . • And the Scottish summer twilights are things to remember. Thev are overdone in-Norway, where they go on all night; where the sun may go behind the hill tor five minutes and begin the , day bet ore you have thought of going to bed. ton can’t keep that up—hut it is exciting enough at first. The great charm or the Norwegian summer to me is t nit it includes what we call spring. Ilm other season in that country is winter, which begins in Septemhei and ends with May. Then, immediately summer begins; the grass grows and' is ready for the scythe the cherries flower and get ripe, and arc eaten —all at once. Aon get those amazing contrasts there winch you only have in mountainous countries; which I remember most vividly crossing the Cevennes iroin Le Buy to Alais. ' On the watershed I was picking daffodils, only just ready to he picked; in the valley of the Ardcche thev were making hay, and roses were dusty' in the hedges. 1 slid Iroin March into June—in twenty minutes. You will not be so piqued in England; yet if your taste lies m the way of strawberries, for instance, you oau do pretty work oven, in You can begin in Cornwall, or feci 11 y, and have vour first disli in early May, or late April, with clotted cream, ol course. Then you can eat your way through the western shires to Hampshire ... in June. . . . Aon can go on to the Ecus and find them ready for you in early July. In August you will find them at their best in Cumberland, and in October, weather permitting, you will have them on your table in Scotland. Altoi that, if you . . • really care tor strawberries, you must leave this kingdom, and perhaps go to California. 1 don’t know.

The summer will give you bettor berries than the strawberry, in my opinion. It will give you the vild strawberry. . . • Then there is the bilberry, which wants cream and a groat deal of tooth-brush afterwards, ami the blaeberry, which grows in Cumberland above tho two thousandfoot mark, just where the Stagsborn moss begins; and the wild raspberry which here is found on the lops of the hills, and in Scotland at the bottoms, . . . In Norway you will

have the cranberry and tiny sneterhenv; but in Norway you will waiu nothing so long as there are cherries. 1 know Kent very well—but its cherries are not so good as those id Norway.—Maurice Hewlett, in ‘ I ami. Essays.