omatic
spikenard, with purple stems and big leaves, stood like a sentinel.
From crannies in the limestone wall the harebell hung, its last
flowers faded, but its foliage still delicately beautiful, like the
tresses of some wraith of the river, clinging to the grim old cliff,
and waiting, like Andromeda, for a Perseus. Tiny blue-green leaves of
the cliff-brake, strung on slender, shining stems, contrasted their
delicate grace with the ruggedness of the old cliff. Still higher,
where a little more moisture trickled down from the wooded ridge
above, the walking fern climbed step by step, patiently pausing to
take new footings by sending out roots from the end of each long,
pointed leaf. Near the top of the cliff, where the red cedars gave
some shade, little communities of bulb-bearing ferns and of polypody
displayed their exquisite fronds, as welcome in a world of beauty as
smiles on a mother's face. Mosses and lichens grew here and there,
staining the face of the old cliff gray, green and yellow. These tiny
ferns and mosses, each drawing the sort of sustenance it needed from
the layers of the limestone, seemed greater than the mountain of rock.
Imposing and spectacular, yet the rock was dead,--the mausoleum for
countless forms of the old life that ceased to be in ages long
forgotten. These fairy forms that sprang from it were the beginnings
of the new life, the better era, the cycle of the future, living,
breathing, almost sentient things, transforming the stubborn stone
into beauty of color and form, into faith that moves mountains and
hope that makes this hour the center of all eternity. For them the
river had been patiently working through the centuries, scoring its
channel just a little deeper, cutting down ever so little each year
the face of the cliff. Eternity stretched backward to the time when
the little stream running between the thin edges of the melting ice
sheets at the top of the high plateau first began to cut the channel
and scarp this mighty cliff; still backward through untold ages to the
time when the lowest layer of limestone in the cliff was only soft
sediment on the shore of a summer sea. Eternity stretched forward,
also, to the time when this perpendicular wall shall have been worn to
a gentle slope, clad with luxuriant verdure, and adorned, perchance,
with fairer flowers than any which earth now knows; still forward
through other untold ages to the time when all earth's fires shall
have cooled; whe