He would curse
his folly for having specialised. While engaged upon one variety, he
would always be hankering after that other kind and thinking how much
better they were. What shall he do, then? Well, he might devote one year
to one species, the next to another, and so on. Or else--seeing that
every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the
interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four
months--he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense,
devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might
work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle
drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation in his rear--browsing
aloft from the sea-board, where brambles are black in June, through
tangled macchia and vine-clad slopes into the cooler acclivities of rock
and jungle--grazing ever upward to where, at close of September and in
the shadow of some lonely peak on which the white mantle of winter has
already fallen, he finds a few more berries struggling for warmth and
sunshine, and then, still higher up, just a few more--the last, the very
last, of their race--dwarfs of the mountains, earthward-creeping, and
frozen pink ere yet they have had time to ripen. Here, crammed to the
brim, he may retire to hibernate, curled up like a full-gorged bear and
ready to roll downhill with the melting snows and arrive at the
sea-coast in time to begin again. What a jolly life! How much better
than being Postmaster-General or Inspector of Nuisances! But such
enthusiasts are nowhere to be found.
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