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Under their feet at times was a wonderful carpet of soft moss in which Thor sank nearly to his armpits. And the forest was filled with a strange gloom and many mysterious shadows, and there hung heavily in it the pungent smells of decaying vegetation. Thor did not travel so swiftly here. The silence and the gloom and the oppressively scented air seemed to rouse his caution.
Its roots bind together the dunes, and its leaves protect their surface. When the sand ceases to drift, the arundo dies, its decaying roots fertilizing the sand, and the decomposition of its leaves forming a layer of vegetable earth over it.
Sea-birds made it their home, and deposited the seeds of various plants, while the ocean washed up other seeds still containing germinating powers. Thus vegetation commenced; and the trees and shrubs decaying, more vegetable mould was formed to support the existence of a further succession of trees and shrubs.
Clothed in his saffron robe and holding with trembling hands his rod of office, he seemed the decaying specimen of a moribund religion. He presented me with an umbrella of yellow silk. It had an ivory handle with the carving of a lotus bud on its end.
In the morning I visited the house where are kept the bodies of the travelers, who perish in crossing the mountain. It is filled with corpses, ranged in rows, and looking like mummies, for the cold is so intense that they will keep for years without decaying, and are often recognized and removed by their friends.
A few broken and decaying logs, or crumbling walls of the adobe were all that remained to attest where the settlers' rancho had stood. We passed a ruined church with its old turrets dropping by piecemeal. Piles of adobe lay around covering the ground for acres. A thriving village had stood there. Where was it now? Where were the busy gossips?
Not a leaf or bough was in motion; nor was a sound heard, except when now and then our ears caught the soughing of the wind among the lofty heads of the pine-trees, the tapping of the woodpeckers on the decaying trunks, or the whistling cry of the little chitmonk as it ran from bough to bough.
And turning suddenly he sat himself down on an old decaying log by the river side, and gave himself up to real, honest, solemn thought. "Where is Dr. Douglass?" queried Julia, appearing at the dining-room door just at tea time. "There is a boy at the door says they want him at Judge Beldon's this very instant."
The Venice wall has the color of Venetian sunsets, the gold and crimson of its clouds, the solemn blue of the Cadore hills, the deep green of the lagoons, the brown and purple of the seaweeds, and the shadows of the city of decaying palaces. Here are such harmonies as Nature strikes in her great symphony of color.
There will be no more palsied hands, no more scattered grey hairs, no more dim and horny eyes, no more stiffened muscles and slow throbbing hearts. 'It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown in decaying old age, it is raised in immortal youth. His servants shall stand in that day among 'the young-eyed cherubim, and be like them for ever. So we may think of the dead in Christ.
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