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Dismal, indeed, was the sight the two lads looked upon. Nowhere could they see anything green, save a few scattered ferns. Everywhere gaunt, ragged, blackened trees thrust their sorrowful looking trunks aloft. The earth was littered with blackened débris burned and partly charred limbs and fallen trees. The very rocks were fire-scarred and scorched.
Every inch of ground, right up to the rocky mountain-side, is turned to advantage, for the production both of the most lovely flowers and ferns and also for miniature aqueducts and water-courses to refresh them. I have never before seen a collection of flowers, ferns, and trees brought to so great a perfection under such difficulties. All are most systematically named and classified.
"From the piece of it you sent me in the winter." "Oh! those ferns? I'm glad you liked them. There's something nice and plucky about those little things, isn't there?" It was every word he could think of to reply. He had a provoked perception that was not altogether nice and plucky, of himself, just then. But that was because the snow was still unlifted from him.
Homage is paid in literature to the palm, and it is an emblem of honour, but our New England ferns, many of them equally majestic, are tossed into heaps for hay and mown down by the ruthless scythe of the farmer every autumn when he shows his greatest agricultural energy by stripping the waysides of their beauty prior to the coming of the roadmender with his awful "turn-piking" process.
"But," objected Joyce, "nobody ever sees them." Joan lifted her round baby face, plump, serene, bright with innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns. She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded.
The servant led her upstairs to a small room, where the veiled sun made warmth on rich hangings, on beautiful furniture, on books and pictures, on ferns and flowers. The goddess of this sanctuary was alone; as the door opened the notes of a zither trembled into silence, and Adela saw a light-robed loveliness rise and stand before her.
Some of the men declared that we had not really seen any one, and that we had mistaken a small tree or shrub for a man; but Jim and I were positive, and the doctor, at all events, believed us. On reaching the top of the hill, we looked down into a large hollow, with water at the bottom, dark rocks forming its sides, grown over with creepers, huge ferns, and various other plants.
Giant ferns, just tinging with autumn colors, waved tips of sculptured perfection. Most wonderful of all were the colored leaves, as they floated downward with a sad, gentle rustle. Helen was brought to a realization of her hazardous undertaking by a sudden roar of water, and the abrupt termination of the ridge in a deep gorge. Grasping a tree she leaned over to look down.
Even in the poorest sections where many foreigners dwell one sees a broken pitcher with its stunted geranium, a window box with ferns and vines or a canary in a rude cage. As soon as a movement is on foot for parks the seekers after gain will be there howling "the poor must be fed!"
Here the noisome smell of decaying vegetation nauseated us, for the air in those forest depths is deadly. Beautiful scarlet wax-flowers would gleam high among the dark-green foliage of the giant cotton-tree, whose stem would be covered with orchids and ferns and dense wreaths of creeper, while many other beautiful blossoms flourished and faded unseen.
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