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Nevertheless, when he again visited the "earth," and, stooping, saw the withered leaves and fern, and detected, not now the scent of a fox, but the scent of half a dozen badgers, his sluggish brain began to move in the right direction.
"Patty!" said Great Fern for him, and made a gesture disdaining more cards. O Lalala scrutinized his face as the sailor the heavens in a storm, and then studied the visages of all his backers. He closed his eyes a moment. Then, "My cally!" he said, as he pushed a great heap of toendstikkers onto the cane mat. The kava-drinkers grew black with excitement.
However," he continued whimsically, "there are such things as English roses, you know. I've always loved them, too, even when they were thorny!" He pulled absently at a fern growing near, while, suddenly, for no particular reason, the color glowed again in the cheeks of the little art teacher. She smiled, half unwillingly.
Imagine a vast, seemingly limitless cathedral with its countless columns covered, nay, composed of the most exquisite dark-green, large-fronded moss, with here and there a delicate fern embedded in it as an extra decoration.
The effect was magical, a bit of its haunt following the fern indoors. Next day I gathered in the hemlock woods a basket of the waxy, spotted-leaved pipsissewa, together with spikes and garlands of club moss. I had thought these perfect when steadied by bog moss in a flat, cut-glass dish, but in the birch stump they were entirely at home.
"Our vales are sweet with fern and rose, Our hills are maple crowned, But not from them our fathers chose The village burial ground. "The dreariest spot in all the land To Death they set apart; With scanty grace from Nature's hand And none from that of Art."
The loft was lighted by a semicircular hole, through which the pigeons crept to their lodgings in the same high quarters of the premises; and from this hole the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft brown fern, which, from its abundance, was used on Egdon in packing away stores of all kinds.
On the other side of the road the land rose a little, and was so covered with stones that it seemed as if there were no earth left for things to grow in. Yet the mountain fern took root there and made the rocks gay with its green fronds. The sun was so low that their shadows stretched far across the bogland beside them as the Twins trudged along.
A Swedish peasant will tell you that snakes may be deprived of their venom by a touch with a hazel wand; and when an ancient Greek had occasion to make his bed in the woods, he selected fern leaves if possible, in the belief that the smell of them would drive away poisonous animals. But the beneficent character of the lightning appears still more clearly in another class of myths.
Another son, Thomas, continued to run the mill, which about the time of the Civil War was converted to the manufacture of linseed oil. In 1869 the entire property was purchased for Fairmount Park, and Glen Fern is now occupied by the Valley Green Canoe Club, which has restored it under the direction of John Livezey.
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