92 IN THE ACADIAN LAND. 



sun shall not smite them, while they have their 

 days of beautiful existence. And all the while 

 the roots become charged with some subtle 

 medicament that has power to heal the shattered 

 nerves of weary men, as the bloom has a charm 

 to minds and hearts that love all lovely things. 

 Let us go back to the ledge itself ; flowers can 

 have no greater interest. When we stand upon 

 its shattered flank we are then on " bed-rock," 

 as the miners call it, or on the " countiy rock," as 

 the geologists term it. Between our feet and 

 the other side of this globe the distance is 

 about eight thousand miles; all the way it is 

 some kind of solid rock or metal. The soil, the 

 mud, and gravel, and sand, in which men plant 

 and sow, and Nature grows her forests, is noth- 

 ing more than rocks made more or less fine and 

 mixed with some vegetable mould. This earth 

 is really a ball of stone or mineral about as 

 heavy as if it were iron, and it floats through 

 space like a bubble in the air, or a toy bal- 

 loon rolling over and over along the viewless 

 track around the sun, that is fourteen hun- 

 dred thousand times larger than this toy world, 

 that can neither get away from it nor fall 

 into it. We live on the outside, at the bot- 

 torn of an ocean of air, a few miles in depth, 

 and with us are a great many other people, 



