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Moving slowly, the snow cries beneath our feet, and the big crystals tinkle. These are shaped like fern-fronds, growing fan-wise from a point, and set at various angles, so that the moonlight takes them with capricious touch.
He leaped down from one toppled tree-trunk upon what seemed be another. But the thing he landed upon gave beneath his boots in the unmistakable fashion of yielding flesh. Something vast and angry stirred and hissed furiously. Something a head, perhaps whipped toward him among the fallen fern-fronds. But he was racing on, sobbing, cursing, praying all at once.
And she watched the women and children, after the men had gone, gathering fern-fronds and twigs for the night fire, and the boys and girls running and playing together. But the very old woman made her feel afraid.
He could not see an opening anywhere, and a strange green light came through the matted branches, the ground was slippery with moisture and decaying substances; from the cliff hung quivering fern-fronds with their points downward, and water dripping from them like wet hair. Huge tree-roots, like the naked bodies of black goblins writhing to get free, lay stretched across the rocks.
In the cathedral at Berne is a happy example of the use of these sweet flowers, as they appear at the feet of the sacred group, and as they carry the eye into the sky by means of the feathery branches like fern-fronds which tops the scene; but we find them nearer home, in almost every Gothic tapestry.
Once more at home, I grew stronger both in body and mind: the spring-time did me good, although welling up within me all the time, so imperiously, so irresistibly, that I never entirely lost the pain, was the thought that never before had I failed to watch the first uncoilings of the fern-fronds beneath the dead leaves of the former year; the willow catkins, the fragrant arbutus, all the signs of inspiration from the earliest breaths of spring in the hedges and meadows and woods about Belfield.
Her life was one ceaseless effort to avoid doing anything which might influence her charges for evil or shock the natural sensitiveness of their parents. She had to wind her earthly way through a forest of the most delicate susceptibilities fern-fronds that stretched across the path, and that she must not even accidentally disturb with her skirt as she passed. No wonder she walked mincingly!
The spirit of enchantment was in the place; brooding in the delicate, luminous midday twilight; hushing the song of the strong-flowing river to a humming murmur; casting a spell of beautiful immobility on the slender flower-stalks and fern-fronds and trailing shrubberies of the undergrowth, while the young leaves of the tree-tops, far overhead, were quivering and dancing in the sunlight and the breeze.
Then, by raising with a prong-shaped stake the grass I had trodden down, and by thrusting back the bramble-trails and fern-fronds I had brushed aside, I carefully removed as far as possible all traces of my visit. I had scarcely settled down to watch and listen, when the faint snap of a twig reached my ears, and I saw that the vixen with her cubs had arrived on the scene.
When dawn came the mountain rats were scurrying about the meadows, but the dogs had gone afar, leaving only the two heaps of bones and the wreckage of all outside the tent to tell of their foray. The sun flooded the mesa, disclosing myriad fern-fronds and mosses and colored petals waving in the light breeze as Le Brunnec and I went down to the stream to bathe. Alas!
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