CHAPTER IV. 



CLOTHED WITH VEGETATION. 



LTPON the bare rocks and the naked hills a garment of 

 J verdure was spread, after the glacier melted. The 

 process of clothing Cohasset was very slow for many 

 years, because every cell and fiber of vegetation had to be 

 made in its own place by the feeble germs of life in the 

 face of great opposition. The hard rocks resisted every 

 root ; the clay upon the slopes of every drumlin was baked 

 hard by the sun or gullied by the rains to resist the en- 

 croachment of vegetable life ; the salt air of the ocean 

 and the lingering coldness of the glacial times added to 

 the difficulties. But life is mightily persistent ! Even 

 before the glacier died, plants of a very low order had pre- 

 empted places for themselves upon the snow and ice. 



The red snow alga which is still to be seen in the arctic 

 regions was spread like a fine red powder upon the snow ; 

 and wherever any soil was exposed upon the ice or at the 

 edge of the melting fragments, there was the alga mak- 

 ing a red mould, just as it may be found nowadays some- 

 times upon the wet ground of a cold spring day. 



Some higher kinds of alga had begun already their life 

 in the salt water along our shore. They were the sea- 

 weeds clinging to the rocks. The snow alga was a tiny 

 globule, but the sea alga grew to be great ribbons waving 

 in the tide or bunches of Irish moss carpeting the depths. 

 The dark brown varieties gathered nearer the surface of 

 the water than the pale Irish moss, where some of it even 

 dares to be exposed to the sun for a few hours at low tide. 

 The most plentiful of these darker algae is the bladder 

 seaweed or rockweed that fringes the rocks near the low- 

 tide mark. It is so named because of the little empty 



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