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 2. Woods and cornfields a little brown,- Lying between them, not quite sere, Biting shorter the short green grass, 4. These and the little house where I was born, And fair young faces all ablush; Perhaps you may have seen, some day, 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; The clear blue eyes, the tender smile, 6. Two little urchins at her knee At ten years old he went to sea,— God knoweth if he be living now,— To bring us news, and she never came back. 7. Bright his hair was, a golden brown, 8. Out in the fields one summer night 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, The berries we gave her she wouldn't eat, So slim and shining, to keep her still. 9. At last we stood at our mother's knee. |