54 
LONELY LOVELINESS. 
camp to divert the mind from their sharp, gray 
granite outlines. The human hopes that, like 
lichens, might some time find a home upon their 
sides, were yet unborn. Even the grace of ver- 
dure which the yellow pines, springing from every 
crevice, strove to throw around them, in that 
undimmed light, showed a thankless/ unappre- 
ciated task. They could not, struggle as they 
might, grow leaves enough to hide their gnarled 
and knotted trunks and limbs. Many of them 
had ceased to try, and their bare, gaunt arms 
stretched above the gray waste seemed to em- 
phasize the solitude. Some keen-eyed eagle 
might make those forbidding heights a tower 
from which to watch the little valley she had left; 
but for other life, the lower grass-grown slopes 
would form a more inviting home, and over them 
she wandered. 
An occasional point of rocks, where one low 
swell suddenly ceased, as though unable to reach 
the height of the preceding wave, that had washed 
up and petrified upon that stern, rock-edged coast 
of a former sea, afforded her a hiding-place from 
which to watch the ways of the shy occupants of 
the land. 
After a brief study, for the morning hours of 
these creatures are very busy ones, and none of 
them stayed long at a time in one spot, she 
would climb on over the crest of one wavelike 
