THE GREATEST MIRACLE

i "Of all the miracles of the green I worm, none surpasses that of tne &*__,,_. 1& nas many names, many raiments : even, but it is always tha. wonderful I, "Cfcung." _*'iona iViaaieoct says in one ot j his Deautifui Nature essays, "which tlie poets of ail time have delighted in calling the green hair of eartn. 'Soft green hair of the rocks,' says a Breton poet. , Another Celtic poet has used the word alike for the mosses which clothe the talons of old trees and' for the forests themselves. No fantastic hyperbole this: from a great height forests' of pine and oak seem like reaches of sombre grass. To the shrewmouse ;the tall grasses of J June are green woods, and the slim stems 'of the reddening sorrels -are , groves of pine -trees.'.' i "Grass is as universal as dew, as commonplace as light. That which feels the seawind in the loneliest Hebrides is brother to that- which lies on Himalaya or is fanned by _ the hot airs of Asian valleys. That which covers a grey scra_> jin Iceland is the same as that on Adam's Peak in Ceylon, and that which in myriad is the prairie of the north is |in myriad the pampas of the south; that whose multitude covers the Gaelic hills is that whose multitude covers the Russia^ steppes. It is of all the signature of Nature that which to us is nearest and homeliest." i _ ''The first spring grass, how welcome it is. What lovely delicacy of green. It is difficult anywhere to match it. . Perhaps the first greening of the sallow. i that lovely hair hung over ponds and streams, or where, sloping .lawns catch the wandering airs of the south, or the pale green-flame of the awakening larch: or the tips of bursting hawthorn in the hedgerows—perhaps, these are nearest to it in hue. Moreover, at any season there is a difference between clown grass and mountain grass, between sea grass and valley grass, between moor grass and wood "grass. It j may be slight, and not in kind but only in shadowy dissemblances of texture and hue; still one may note the difference. j More obVious. of course, is the difference between, say. April grass and the same grass when May ov June suffuses ; it with the red plow of the seeding sorrel, nv between +he sea grass -that has | had the salt wind upon it since its birth, the bent as it is commonly called' and ' its • brother among the spares and ch'ff S edr"-"? . f +. . "hills, so marvellously soft 1 and hairlike.'"