In The Less Exposed Places These Come Forth, Seeking The Shade,
Searching For Moisture, They Form Like Small Sponges On
A coral
reef; but growing, spread and change to meet the changing contours
of the land they win, and with
Every victory or upward move, adopt
some new refined intensive tint that is the outward and visible
sign of their diverse inner excellences and their triumph. Ever
evolving they spread, until there are great living rugs of strange
textures and oriental tones; broad carpets there are of gray and
green; long luxurious lanes, with lilac mufflers under foot, great
beds of a moss so yellow chrome, so spangled with intense red sprigs,
that they might, in clumsy hands, look raw. There are knee-deep
breadths of polytrichum, which blends in the denser shade into a
moss of delicate crimson plush that baffles description.
Down between the broader masses are bronze-green growths that run
over each slight dip and follow down the rock crannies like streams
of molten brass. Thus the whole land is overlaid with a living,
corrosive mantle of activities as varied as its hues.
For ages these toil on, improving themselves, and improving the
country by filing down the granite and strewing the dust around
each rock.
The frost, too, is at work, breaking up the granite lumps; on every
ridge there is evidence of that - low, rounded piles of stone which
plainly are the remnants of a boulder, shattered by the cold. Thus,
lichen, moss, and frost are toiling to grind the granite surfaces
to dust.
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