ind
of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough,
insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge
and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to
herself, "It's done brown enough by this time"? What an odd
revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a
small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected,
until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced
by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened
down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and
ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or
horny-shelled,--turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them
softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine
watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a
joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her
flat-pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy
crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of
four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young
larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in
the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned
and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded
community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury
of legs--and some of them have a good many--rush round wildly,
butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general
stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by
sunshine. NEXT YEAR you will find the grass growing tall and green
where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle
had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and
the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden
disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate
through their glorified being.

--The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very
familiar way,--at which I do not choose to take offence, but which
I sometimes think it necessary to repress,--that I was coming it
rather strong on the butterflies.

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images,--the
butterfly as well as the others. The stone is ancient error. The
grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by
it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that
thrive in darkness, and the weak