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I intended to rest for only a little while. I put down my clubs beside me, and sat resting my chin on my hands. I saw with a sort of colourless interest that the rocks of the basin, where here and there the crackling dry lichens had shrunk away to show them, were all veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter.

Its walls were sombre and rough like the rocks, but with tiny tufts of green moss and lichens over them. There were three uneven steps before the threshold, and the inside latch was opened by a length of rope-yarn run through a hole.

It is for this reason that persons of taste have taken pains to face their houses with weather-stained and lichen-crusted stone, or invent proper names for them, in imitation of the English manor-houses. But Nature is jealous of this helping, and neither the lichens nor the names will stick, for the reason that they never grew there.

Below the house a gate opened into the farmyard, and Uncle Chirgwin's land chiefly sloped away into the coomb behind, though certain fields upon the opposite side of the highroad also pertained to him. The farmhouse was time-stained, and the stone had taken some wealth of color where black and golden lichens fretted it.

Some that I have heard of are said to be fifteen and even eighteen feet thick. Clad in rich, glossy plumes, with gray lichens covering their smooth, tapering boles, perfect trees of this species are truly noble objects and well worthy the place they hold in these glorious forests. It is of this tree that the Indians make their fine canoes.

At the extremity of the little garden, under shelter of an ancient, gnarled tree, that screened a semicircular seat from the observation of those passing on the street, Beryl sat down to rest; to collect her thoughts. In the solitude, she threw back her veil, leaned her head against the trunk of the tree where wan lichens made a pearly cushion, and shut her eyes.

In places where the precipice offers smooth surfaces of solid rock, it remains quite bare, or only stained with lichens, and dotted with clumps of ferns that grow on the small ledges and in the minutest crevices. The reader who is familiar with tropical nature only through the medium of books and botanical gardens will picture to himself in such a spot many other natural beauties.

In the northern part of the temperate zone, the cryptogamous plants are the first that cover the stony crust of the globe. The lichens and mosses, that develop their foliage beneath the snows, are succeeded by grumina and other phanerogamous plants. This order of vegetation differs on the borders of the torrid zone, and in the countries between the tropics.

But just as they had almost deciphered the secret, the broidered shadow disappeared under a bush, leaving them in new perplexity. They looked for the story in the windings of the checkerberry-vine and blue-eyed periwinkle, on the lichens curiously growing on the boles of aged trees; but for all these they had no dictionary.

Upon their limbs in April the Spanish moss and air-plants were just blossoming, the former into little star-like, hardly-discernible flowers, the latter throwing up a green stem with a pink terminal bud, which in August had burst into a spike of crimson flowers. Curious lichens cover the rough trunks of these oaks some gray, some ashy-white, some pink, some scarlet like blotches of blood.