UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



landscape. Slumbering here and there upon the 

 turf, they enhance the sense of repose. How expres- 

 sionless and uninteresting the landscape in one of 

 the prairie States, or in one of the Southern States, 

 contrasted with a New England or a New York farm ! 

 The grazing or ruminating cattle add a picturesque 

 feature, but the gray granite boulders have been ly- 

 ing there chewing their stony cuds vastly longer. 

 How meditative and contented they look, dreaming 

 the centuries away! 



The rocks have a history ; gray and weather-worn, 

 they are veterans of many battles; they have most 

 of them marched in the ranks of vast stone brigades 

 during the ice age; they have been torn from the 

 hills, recruited from the mountain-tops, and mar- 

 shaled on the plains and in the valleys; and now 

 the elemental war is over, there they lie waging a 

 gentle but incessant warfare with time, and slowly, 

 oh, so slowly, yielding to its attacks ! I say they he 

 there, but some of them are still in motion, creeping 

 down the slopes, or out from the clay-banks, nudged 

 and urged along by the frosts and the rains, and the 

 sun. It is hard even for the rocks to keep still m this 

 world of motion, but it takes the hour-hand of many 

 years to mark their progress. What in my child- 

 hood we called *'the old pennyroyal rock," because 

 /)ennyroyal always gTew beside it, has, in my time, 

 crept out of the bank by the roadside three or four 

 feet. When a rock, loosened from its ties in the hills, 



42 



