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How beautiful and homelike it was! plushy moss for mattresses decked with red corner berries, noble spruce standing guard about us and spreading kindly protecting arms. A few ferns, aspidiums, polypodiums, with dewberry vines, coptis, pyrola, leafless huckleberry bushes, and ledum grow beneath the trees.

The Irish filmy is the largest, covering the face of large rocks under dense shade, its fronds growing to over a foot in length. Many polypodiums and aspleniums grow gracefully on the rocks and trees during the rainy season. One especially elegant polypodium growing on the ground has fronds about 6 or 7 feet long, and sometimes as much as 20 feet, and of proportionate width.

The upper parts of the small creeks, which come down in these plains, were full of water, and had their source generally between heaps of bare basaltic rocks, surrounded by rich grass, and a scanty scrub of Pittosporum, of the native mulberry, of the fig-tree, and of several vines, with Polypodiums, Osmundas, and Caladiums growing between them.

Polypodiums with brown, oak-leaf like, infantile fronds clung tightly to the rocks with furry fingers, and the birds'-nests were big enough to conceal a man. A broad and comfortable path it was, leading directly under the crystal, and with haste and confidence I pushed along, smiling inwardly at "shynynge" fortune, to be in another moment dismayed by her "brutilness." The earth sank under me.