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intermingled clump of birches and hazels stretch half-way across, tripling with their shade the apparent depth of the pool, and heightening in an equal ratio the white flicker of the cascade, and the effect of the bright patches of foam which, flung from the rock, incessantly revolve on the eddy.

4. Mark now the geology of the ravine. For about halfway from where it opens to the shore, to where the path is obstructed by the deep mossy pool and the cascade, its precipitous sides consist of three bars or stories. There is first, reckoning from the stream upwards, a broad bar of pale red; then a broad bar of pale lead color; last and highest, a broad bar of pale yellow; and above all, there rises a steep green slope that continues its ascent till it gains the top of the ridge.

5. The middle, lead-colored bar is an ichthyolite bed, a place of sepulture among the rocks, where the dead lie by myriads. The yellow bar above is a thick bed of saliferous sandstone. We may see the projections on which the sun. has beat most powerfully, covered with a white crust of salt, and it may be deemed worthy of remark, in connection with the circumstance, that its shelves and crannies are richer in vegetation than those of the other bars. The pale red bar below is composed of a coarser and harder sandstone, which forms an upper moiety of the arenaceous portion of the great conglomerate.

6. Now mark, further, that on reaching a midway point between the beach and the cascade, this triple-barred line of precipices abruptly terminates, and a line of precipices of coarse conglomerate as abruptly begins. I occasionally pass a continuous wall, built at two different periods, and composed of two different kinds of material; the one-half of it is formed of white sandstone, the other half of a dark-colored 13

basalt; and the place where the sandstone ends and the basalt begins is marked by a vertical line, on the one side of which all is dark colored, while all is of a light color on the other.

7. Equally marked and abrupt is the vertical line which separates the triple-barred from the conglomerate cliffs of the ravine of Eathie. The ravine itself may be described as a fault in the strata, but here is a fault lying at right angles with it, on a much larger scale; the great conglomerate on which the triple bars rest has been cast up at least two hundred feet, and placed side by side with them.

8. And yet the surface above bears no trace of the catastrophe. Denuding agencies of even greater power than those which have hollowed out the cliffs of the neighboring coast, or whose operations have been prolonged through periods of even more extended duration, have ground down the projected line of the upheaved mass to the level of the undisturbed masses beside it.

9. Now mark further, as we ascend the ravine, that the grand cause of the disturbance appears to illustrate, as it were, and that very happily, the manner in which the fault was originally produced. The precipice, over which the stream leaps at one bound into the mossy hollow, is composed of granitic gneiss, and seems evidently to have introduced itself, with much disturbance, among the surrounding conglomerate and sandstones.

10. A few hundred yards higher up the dell, there is another much loftier precipice of gneiss, round which we find the traces of still greater disturbance; and higher still, yet a third abrupt precipice of the same rock. The gneiss rose trap-like, in steps, and carried up the sandstone before it in detached squares. Each step has its answering fault

immediately over it; and the fault where the triple bars and the conglomerate meet is merely a fault whose step of granitic gneiss stopped short ere it reached the surface.

LXXIV.-AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE

ALICE CAREY.

1. O, good painter, tell me true,

Has your hand the cunning to draw
Shapes of things that you never saw?
Ay? Well, here is an order for you.

2. Woods and cornfields a little brown,-
The picture must not be over bright,—
Yet all in the golden and gracious light
Of a cloud when the summer sun is down.
3. Alway and alway, night and morn,
Woods upon woods, with fields of corn

Lying between them, not quite sere,
And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom,
When the wind can hardly find breathing room
Under their tassels,-cattle near,

Biting shorter the short green grass,
And a hedge of sumach and sassafras,
With bluebirds twittering all around,-
Ah, good painter, you can't paint sound!

4. These and the little house where I was born,
Low and little and black and old,
With children, many as it can hold,
All at the windows, open wide,—
Heads and shoulders clear outside,

And fair young faces all ablush;

Perhaps you may have seen, some day,
Roses crowding the self-same way,
Out of a wilding, way-side bush.

5. Listen closer. When you have done

With woods and cornfields and grazing herds, A lady, the loveliest ever the sun

Looked down upon, you must paint for me;
Oh if I only could make you see

The clear blue eyes, the tender smile,
The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace,
The woman's soul and the angel's face
That are beaming on me all the while!
I need not speak these foolish words:
Yet one word tells you all I would say,—
She is my mother: you will agree
That all the rest may be thrown away.

6. Two little urchins at her knee
You must paint, sir; one like me,-
The other with a clearer brow,
And the light of his adventurous eyes
Flashing with boldest enterprise :

At ten years old he went to sea,—

God knoweth if he be living now,—
He sailed in the good ship "Commodore,"-
Nobody ever crossed her track

To bring us news, and she never came back.
Ah, 'tis twenty long years and more
Since that old ship went out of the bay
With my great-hearted brother on her deck:
I watched him till he shrank to a speck,
And his face was toward me all the way.

7. Bright his hair was, a golden brown,
The time we stood at our mother's knee;
That beauteous head, if it did go down,
Carried sunshine into the sea!

8. Out in the fields one summer night
We were together, half afraid

Of the corn-leaves' rustling, and of the shade Of the high hills, stretching so still and far,Loitering till after the low little light Of the candle shone through the open door, And, over the hay-stack's pointed top, All of a tremble, and ready to drop

The first half-hour, the great yellow star,
That we, with staring, ignorant eyes,
Had often and often watched to see
Propped and held in its place in the skies
By the fork of a tall red mulberry tree,
Which close in the edge of our flax-field grew,—
Dead at the top,-just one branch full
Of leaves, notched round, and lined with wool,
From which it tenderly shook the dew
Over our heads, when we came to play
In its handbreadth of shadow day after day.
Afraid to go home, sir; for one of us bore
A nest full of speckled and thin-shelled eggs,-
The other, a bird, held fast by the legs,
Not so big as a straw of wheat:

The berries we gave her she wouldn't eat,
But cried and cried, till we held her bill,

So slim and shining, to keep her still.

9. At last we stood at our mother's knee.
Do you think, sir, if you try,
You can paint the look of a lie?

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