A Thousand-Mile Walk 



and golden with a profusion of flowers. Among 

 these I discovered a small bush whose yellow 

 flowers were ideal; all the parts were present 

 regularly alternate and in fives, and all sepa 

 rate, a plain harmony. 



When a page is written over but once it may 

 be easily read; but if it be written over and 

 over with characters of every size and style, it 

 soon becomes unreadable, although not a single 

 confused meaningless mark or thought may oc 

 cur among all the written characters to mar 

 its perfection. Our limited powers are similarly 

 perplexed and overtaxed in reading the inex 

 haustible pages of nature, for they are written 

 over and over uncountable times, written in 

 characters of every size and color, sentences 

 composed of sentences, every part of a char 

 acter a sentence. There is not a fragment in 

 all nature, for every relative fragment of one 

 thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. All 

 together form the one grand palimpsest of 

 the world. 



One of the most common plants of my pas- 

 [ 164] 



