ONLY A PEBBLE. 19 



something peculiarly tragic in the simple fact, that the 

 rock succumbs to the powers of that same life which he 

 first bore, first nourished. He gathered around his lofty 

 head the waters of the air and the clouds and thunder- 

 storms which he nursed in his bosom and bore many a 

 long day on his mighty shoulders, strike, like thankless 

 children, their sharp fangs into his side. Mosses and 

 algse, that found a safe home in his thousand chinks and 

 clefts, eat their way into his substance, and caused his 

 rocky surface to decay. Dark forests grew on his ridges, 

 and he fed them age after age with his life's blood 

 but what is his reward? They sport with the vapors of 

 the far-off ocean ; they call them and keep them in loving 

 embrace, or pour them in fierce rain and destructive hail 

 upon his decaying sides. The very grasses with which he 

 loved to deck his sweet, fragrant meadows, dig with spade 

 and auger into the crumbling stone, and consume layer 

 after layer. And when all these, his graceless children, 

 cannot conquer the mighty giant, man comes to their aid, 

 and with cruel machinery, with brutal powder, he breaks 

 his iron limbs, and cuts and carves at his granite foun- 

 dation. As the giants and titans of ancient Greece fell, 

 one by one, victims of a higher power, in whose service 

 they had won a noble fame, so the very life that the 

 rock created and nourished, feeds in turn upon him, and 

 Fate decrees his death through the results of his own 

 colossal strength. 



But there is Life in Death. Not in man's inspired 

 writings only, but in every lineament, in every movement 

 of our great mother Earth all around us, all over this 



