SHATTERED ILLUSIONS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10067, 13 June 1910, Page 4

SHATTERED ILLUSIONS.

Every colonial has a laudable desire to taste for Hmself of the wonders and the surpassing beauties of the Mother Coentry, where, from childhood, he has been taught t) believe

every prospect pleases and only man is vile. Who, for example, has not been sedulously tutored in the delights of rural simplicity at Home —of clotted cream and dog roses, of glowing gorse-whins and "banks of mossy green" so well beloved of the star-like primrose, of bosky dells where the daffodil unfurls its tender sails; of banks where the wild thyme grows? But these illusions are becoming dispelled. The English glades and woods are rapidly being denuded of their most delightful adornments, and the time is within measurable distance when the English indigenous flora will be confined I to specimens, stored away in a musty herbarium. The grimy paw of the huckster and the costarmonger has been laid with eager cupidity upon the'wiid primrose. It has been torn root and branch from its fragrant bed and sold into captivity for a few pence, to be stuck in London flower pots. So extensive has this sorry traffic grown to be, that not only the primrose, but nearly every other marketable wild plant is aaid to be becoming more rare as the years go by. What with the interminable rush of motors, the growing sophistication of rural fo*k, and the depletion of Flora's fairest gifts, the English country lane seems to be rapidly ' degenerating into a mere dusty canal.