The rich soil amid the hollows above was covered with the strange Grape-Fern, locally called Umbrella-Fern (_Botrychium Virginianum_). Maiden-Hair and numerous other common ferns and brakes filled the swamps below. Coming from the woods, I entered a hayfield where the mowers were at work. Beyond this, I entered a cow-pasture skirting the Glebe ridge. Here were deep hollows guttered out, leading northward to Pownal Centre. Pennyroyal grew over the parched, dry plains, and in the hot sun shed forth its aromatic perfume. Boulders and natural obelisks were lodged on the hills above. In character the latter are similar to rocking stones, that are so finely poised on the mutton-backed bed-rock, that with pressure they sway slightly. The obelisks are either pillar-like boulders moored in the mud and soil, or formed along cliffs by the heat, frost, and wind erosions, causing them to appear like columns or broken monuments, in the distance. On the rocks of the Glebe hills, I again collected the Walking-Fern, and I am sure that if I were to penetrate the cliffs of the gulf along the western slopes of this ridge, I should find the Rue-of-the-Wall and Purple-stemmed Cliff-Brake. Far away in the hollow, slept the little village of Pownal Centre. The church steeple towered among the trees, and the village green sloped between the church and the old Revolutionary road. [Illustration: =The Rocking Boulder, Located on the Granite Ridge near the Bear’s Den, in the Zoölogical Garden, Bronx Park, New York City. A pressure of fifty pounds causes this boulder to move about two inches.= “These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges.... The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.”—THOREAU. From photograph by George Stonebridge.] XVI Alpine Blossoms of the Dome Mountains seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons for the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper.—JOHN RUSKIN. Of the swamps and domes of the Hoosac region, Henry Ward Beecher once said: “The most level portion of this region, if removed to Illinois, would be an eminent hill. The region is a valley only because the mountains on the east and west are so much higher than the hills in the intermediate space. The endless variety of such a country never ceases to astonish and please. At every ten steps the aspect changes; every variation of atmosphere, and therefore every hour of the day, produces new effects. It is everlasting company to you. It is, indeed, just like some choice companion of rich heart and genial imagination, never twice alike, in mood, in conversation, in radiant sobriety, or half-bright sadness, bold, tender, deep, various.”