a mere speck in the midst of unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our
social history in pictorial writing.

Our rural tracts--where no Babel-chimney scales the heavens--are without
mighty objects to fill the soul with the sense of an outer world
unconquerably aloof from our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds (and
let us try to keep them such for the children's children who will
inherit no other sort of demesne); the grasses and reeds nod to each
other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by; the very heights
laugh with corn in August or lift the plough-team against the sky in
September. Then comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and
barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face
or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cut
through or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level and
the white steam-pennon flies along it.

But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, all signs of
permanence upon it raise a tender attachment instead of awe: some of us,
at least, love the scanty relics of our forests, and are thankful if a
bush is left of the old hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the
delicate ivy-leaved toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of grey
thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop of
grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And then the tiled roof
of cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where generations of the
milky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where
the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dog
barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on the
outflying grain--the roofs that have looked out from among the elms and
walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or
below the square stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tinted