Well:  but it seems so strange.

So it is, my child; and so is everything.  But, as the fool says in Shakespeare—­

   “A long time ago the world began,
   With heigh ho, the wind and the rain.”

And the wind and the rain have made strange work with the poor old world ever since.  And that is about all that we, who are not very much wiser than Shakespeare’s fool, can say about the matter.  But again—­the London Pride grows here, and so does another saxifrage very like it, which we call Saxifraga Geum.  Now, when I saw those two plants growing in the Western Pyrenees, between France and Spain, and with them the beautiful blue butterwort, which grows in these Kerry bogs—­we will go and find some—­what could I say but that Spain and Ireland must have been joined once?

I suppose it must be so.

Again.  There is a little pink butterwort here in the bogs, which grows, too, in dear old Devonshire and Cornwall; and also in the south-west of Scotland.  Now, when I found that too, in the bogs near Biarritz, close to the Pyrenees, and knew that it stretched away along the Spanish coast, and into Portugal, what could my common sense lead me to say but that Scotland, and Ireland, and Cornwall, and Spain were all joined once?  Those are only a few examples.  I could give you a dozen more.  For instance, on an island away there to the west, and only in one spot, there grows a little sort of lily, which is found I believe in Brittany, and on the Spanish and Portuguese heaths, and even in North-west Africa.  And that Africa and Spain were joined not so very long ago at the Straits of Gibraltar there is no doubt at all.

But where did the Mediterranean Sea run out then?

Perhaps it did not run out at all; but was a salt-water lake, like the Caspian, or the Dead Sea.  Perhaps it ran out over what is now the Sahara, the great desert of sand, for, that was a sea-bottom not long ago.

But then, how was this land of Atlantis joined to the Cape of Good Hope?

I cannot say how, or when either.  But this is plain:  the place in the world where the most beautiful heaths grow is the Cape of Good Hope?  You know I showed you Cape heaths once at the nursery gardener’s at home.

Oh yes, pink, and yellow, and white; so much larger than ours.

Then it seems (I only say it seems) as if there must have been some land once to the westward, from which the different sorts of heath spread south-eastward to the Cape, and north-eastward into Europe.  And that they came north-eastward into Europe seems certain; for there are no heaths in America or Asia.

But how north-eastward?

Think.  Stand with your face to the south and think.  If a thing comes from the south-west—­from there, it must go to the north-east-towards there.  Must it not?

Oh yes, I see.

Now then—­The farther you go south-west, towards Spain, the more kinds of heath there are, and the handsomer; as if their original home, from which they started, was somewhere down there.