to the green, blossoming, beautiful verge of Gospel truth, to
confirm its later revelation, and to say that Law and Gospel
belong together. "The sea is His, and He made it: and His hands
formed the dry land."

And the dry land, the very dust of the earth, every day revealed
to me some new miracle of a flower. Coming home from school one
warm noon, I chanced to look down, and saw for the first time the
dry roadside all starred with lavender-tinted flowers, scarcely
larger than a pin-head; fairy-flowers, indeed; prettier than
anything that grew in gardens. It was the red sand-wort; but why
a purple flower should be called red, I do not know. I remember
holding these little amethystine blossoms like jewels in the palm
of my hand, and wondering whether people who walked along that
road knew what beautiful things they were treading upon. I never
found the flower open except at noonday, when the sun was
hottest. The rest of the time it was nothing but an
insignificant, dusty-leaved weed,--a weed that was transformed
into a flower only for an hour or two every day. It seemed like
magic.

The busy people at home could tell me very little about the wild
flowers, and when I found a new one I thought I was its
discoverer. I can see myself now leaning in ecstasy over a small,
rough-leaved purple aster in a lonely spot on the hill, and
thinking that nobody else in all the world had ever beheld such a
flower before, because I never had. I did not know then, that the
flower-generations are older than the human race.

The commonest blossoms were, after all, the dearest, because they