360 THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



some of the noblest conceptions of the human mind 

 have been borrowed from their varied chambers of 

 imagery. Even the mourning dress of our mother earth 

 the dress which she assumes in her lonely wastes 

 when she strips off the outer floral coat of many colours, 

 and is seen arrayed only in her sackcloth and ashes is 

 beautiful and becoming to her. But she acquires an 

 added loveliness when, in her fertile fields and luxuriant 

 forests, she clothes herself with her garments of praise 

 her emerald robe of vegetation the common house- 

 hold dress in which she waits upon the daily wants of 

 her creatures, and contributes most to the joy of her 

 noblest sons. And, most marvellous paradox of all, she 

 has made all life vegetable, animal, and human to be 

 sustained by combustion ! 



And like the old processes of nature are the new ones 

 that take place still. In the beautiful balancing of crea- 

 tion the same recuperative process follows every such 

 loss. Out of the ashes of the local conflagration that 

 has reduced the fields and forests to one uniform 

 blackened waste, come forth the beauty of greener fields 

 and forests of species unknown there before. Very 

 strikingly is this seen on the dry hillsides of the Sierra 

 Nevada, covered with dense scrub which is often swept 

 by fire. All the trees in the groves of pine that grow on 

 these hillsides, however unequal in size, as a recent 

 writer has strikingly shown, are of the same age, and 

 the cones which they produce are persistent, and never 

 discharge their seeds until the tree or the branch to 

 which they belong dies. Consequently, when one of 



