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I determined to make love to it; I made up my mind to know it tree by tree, to search out its humblest plants, its vetches, its saxifrages, and to see whether there was no Solomon's seal to be found growing beneath the shade of the big trees. I kept my word and now I am beginning to make acquaintance with the flora and fauna of my little wood.
Around the great fire-mountains, above the forests and beneath the snow, there is a flowery zone of marvelous beauty planted with anemones, erythroniums, daisies, bryanthus, kalmia, vaccinium, cassiope, saxifrages, etc., forming one continuous garden fifty or sixty miles in circumference, and so deep and luxuriant and closely woven it seems as if Nature, glad to find an opening, were economizing space and trying to see how may of her bright-eyed darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath.
There were violets, too; and white and purple and golden saxifrages peeping out between the stones which bordered the trickling stream a scene of enchantment, indeed, for City eyes accustomed to gaze only on bricks and mortar.
Now, don't all scream at once over these beauties;" and Frank shook out some evergreen sprigs, half a dozen saxifrages, and two or three forlorn violets with hardly any stems. "I don't brag, but here's the best of all the three," chuckled Jack, producing a bunch of feathery carrot-tops, with a few half-shut dandelions trying to look brave and gay. "Oh, boys, is that all?" "What shall we do?"
"But Love is there, like the bee in the calyx of the flower," replied Wilfrid, perceiving for the first time a trace of earthly sentiment in her words, and fancying the moment favorable for an expression of his passionate tenderness. "Always there?" said Seraphita, smiling. Minna had left them for a moment to gather the blue saxifrages growing on a rock above. "Always," repeated Wilfrid.
Then, to account for the presence of a Spanish flora in the west of Ireland, a bold hypothesis, started by Professor Edward Forbes, is put forward 'that the west of Ireland was geologically united with the north of Spain; admitting which, there is no difficulty in supposing the plants to have travelled along the intervening land, which has subsequently disappeared, and that, owing to climatic changes, the hardier sort of plants, such as saxifrages and heaths, have alone survived.
Some of the short laterals of the glaciers that drew their fountain snows from the jagged recesses of the summit are from one to two hundred feet in height, and scarce at all wasted as yet, notwithstanding the countless storms that have fallen upon them, while cool rills flow between them, watering charming gardens of arctic plants saxifrages, larkspurs, dwarf birch, ribes, and parnassia, etc. beautiful memories of the Ice Age, representing a once greatly extended flora.
Higher we could not go with the animals and find food for them and wood for our own campfires, for just beyond this lies the region of ice, with only here and there an open spot on the ridges in the midst of the ice, with dwarf alpine plants, such as saxifrages and drabas, which reach far up between the glaciers, and low mats of the beautiful bryanthus, while back of us were the gardens and abundance of everything that heart could wish.
The very bareness of the room its open rafters, plastered walls, primitive settees, and red-brick floor, on which a dog sits waiting for a bone enhances the impression of artistic delicacy in the table. The road from Gubbio, immediately after leaving the city, enters a narrow Alpine ravine, where a thin stream dashes over dark, red rocks, and pendent saxifrages wave to the winds.
But there is not the same deluge that descends upon the outer ridges. So the forest is not so dense. Frequently in its place social grasses clothe the mountain-sides; and yellow violets, primulas, anemones, delphiniums, currants, and saxifrages remind us of regions more akin to our own.
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