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 lie 

 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 in 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 

 pennyroyal always grew 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, 

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