52 By Stream and Sea. 



vegetable life ; that listening ear, like that of the hero in the 

 fairy tale, seemed to catch the growing of the grass and 

 the opening of the shell." 



Remembering his enthusiastic love of out-door pursuits, it 

 is not surprising to be told by Kingsley, as he takes his 

 morning's ride, that once his brains were " full of bison and 

 grizzly bear, mustang, and bighorn, Blackfoot and Pawnee, 

 and hopes of wild adventure in the Far West ; which," he 

 added, " I shall never see," little dreaming that in years to 

 come a trip across the Rocky Mountains would sow in that 

 iron constitution seeds of death. 



His pulses, declares this genial country parson, throbbed 

 as often as he saw the stag's head in his friend's hall ; and 

 then with mock dolorousness, and with just a soupgon of that 

 muscular Christianity of which it was said he was the original 

 patentee, and which, if it means anything, means making 

 the best of both worlds, he confesses that when one can no 

 longer enjoy the sights after which one longs it is best to 

 take the nearest and look for wdnders, " not in the Hima- 

 layas or Lake Ngami, but on the turf, on the lawn, and the 

 brook in the park. For there it is, friend," he goes on — 

 " the whole infinite miracle of nature in every tuft of 

 grass, if we have only eyes to see it, and can disabuse our 

 minds of that tyrannous phantom of size. Only recollect 

 that great and small are but relative terms; that in truth 

 nothing is great or small save in proportion to the quantity 

 of creative thought which has been exercised in making it; 

 that the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of Stone- 

 henge is in truth infinitely greater than all Stonehenge to- 

 gether, though he may measure the tenth of an inch, and 

 the stone on which he sits five-and-twenty feet." 



Kingsley's Winter Garden is at the present moment just 

 what it was when he drew rein and slowly wandered on 



