362 THE OLIVE LEAF CHAP. 



the renovator ; and out of each successive baptism of 

 fire, the scene emerges with a richer luxuriance and a 

 more passionate loveliness. The ashes of the burning 

 that have devastated homestead and vineyard, reappear 

 in the delicate clusters of the grape, and the vivid ver- 

 dure of the vine leaves which embower a new home of 

 happiness on the site. 



And a case of extremes meeting frost has the same 

 effect as fire. No meadows are greener, no corn-fields 

 more luxuriant, than those which spread over the soil 

 that has been formed by the attrition of ancient glaciers. 

 The cedars of Lebanon grow on the moraines left be- 

 hind by ice streams that had sculptured the mountains 

 into their present shape ; and over the ranges of the 

 Sierra Nevada, the coniferous forests, the noblest and 

 most beautiful on earth, are spread in long curving 

 bands, braided together into lace-like patterns of charm- 

 ing variety an arrangement determined by the course 

 of ancient glaciers, upon whose moraines all the forests 

 of the Nevada are growing, and whose varied distribu- 

 tion over curves and ridges and high rolling plateaus, 

 the trees have faithfully followed. Elsewhere through- 

 out the world pine-woods usually grow, not on soil 

 produced by the slow weathering of the atmosphere, but 

 by the direct mechanical action of glaciers, which 

 crushed and ground it from the solid rocks of mountain 

 ranges, and in their slow recession at the end of the 

 glacial period, left it spread out in beds available for 

 tree-growth. Thus, from the ashes left behind by the 

 slow grinding of the ice-ploughs of the earth's great 



