A "Thousand- Mile Walk 



and golden with a profusion of flowers. Among 

 these I discovered a small bush whose yellow 

 flowers were ideal; all the parts were present 

 regularly alternate and in fives, and all sepa- 

 rate, a plain harmony. 



When a page is written over but once it may 

 be easily read; but if it be written over and 

 over with characters of every size and style, it 

 soon becomes unreadable, although not a single 

 confused meaningless mark or thought may oc- 

 cur among all the written characters to mar 

 its perfection. Our limited powers are similarly 

 perplexed and overtaxed in reading the inex- 

 haustible pages of nature, for they are written 

 over and over uncountable times, written in 

 characters of every size and color, sentences 

 composed of sentences, every part of a char- 

 acter a sentence. There is not a fragment in 

 all nature, for every relative fragment of one 

 thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. All 

 together form the one grand palimpsest of 

 the world. 



One of the most common plants of my pas- 

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