22 PKOSEKPINA. 



brown ones: nevertheless, the chief use of lichens is for 

 silver and gold colour on rocks ; and it is the dead moss 

 which gives the leopard-like touches of black. And yet 

 here again as to a thing I have been looking at and 

 painting all my life I am brought to pause, the moment 

 I think of it carefully. The black moss which gives the 

 precious Velasquez touches, lies, much of it, flat on the 

 rocks ; radiating from its centres powdering in the 

 fingers, if one breaks it off, like dry tea. Is it a black 

 species ? or a black-parched state of other species, perish- 

 ing for the sake of Velasquez effects, instead of accumu- 

 lation of earth? and, if so, does it die of drought, acci- 

 dentally, or, in a sere old age, naturally ? and how is it 

 related to the rich green bosses that grow in deep velvet ? 

 And there again is another matter not clear to me. One 

 calls them ' velvet ' because they are all brought to an 

 even surface at the top. Our own velvet is reduced to 

 such trimness by cutting. But how is the moss trimmed? 

 By what scissors ? Caref ullest Elizabethan gardener never 

 shaped his yew hedge more daintily than the moss fairies 

 smooth these soft rounded surfaces of green and gold. 

 And just fancy the difference, if they were ragged! If 

 the fibres had every one of them Jeave to grow at their 

 own sweet will, and to be long or short as they liked, or, 

 worse still, urged by fairy prizes into laboriously and 

 agonizingly trying which could grow longest. Fancy the 

 surface of a spot of competitive moss ! 



16. But how is it that they are subdued into that spheri- 



