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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