Next time you pass an old gateway or ruined wall, and notice stains of
yellow and brown and grey upon it, remember that there the lichens grow;
tiny plants indeed, whose beauties are revealed only by the microscope, but
each one of them made by God, and given the means of living by Him, just
as much as those giants of the forest of which travellers tell us such
wonderful tales. You may sometimes find a rock, or the trunk of a tree,
encrusted with dry lichen, and it is interesting to know that these plants
when they decay form the first mould for mosses and ferns, plants which
botanists think of as higher in the scale of vegetable life than the lowly
lichens themselves are.
The great family of mosses is found not only near home, but even far away
amid the icefields and the snow, where the reindeer searches with its horns
for the white moss which is its food, and where Sir John Franklin and his
devoted men gathered the black _Tripe de Roche_ upon which they tried to
live during those dark months when their ship lay fast wedged between
"... those icebergs vast,
With heads all crowned with snow,
Whose green roots sleep in the awful deep,
Two hundred fathoms low."
But prettier than these Arctic mosses are those nearer home. Talking about
them makes me think of a place where I wish you and I could go together
some beautiful afternoon in winter. It is a lovely little pine-wood near
Bournemouth, to which some boys, with whose friends I was staying during
the Christmas holidays, wished to take me to see their favourite walk.
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