Scrambling up the side of a moss-grown rock I come face to face, on the top, with a huge snail. To my great surprise I get a glimpse of a queer, dog-like visage, with snub nose and bright eyes; then the creature pulls its soft, shelly hood down over its head and I can see only its round, resolute-looking shoulders. I poke it in the back, but it only hunches itself together and rolls over; I cannot get another peep at its head. That passing glimpse of the sturdy, bull-dog face, however, helps me understand the persistence with which, once they are started, these creatures travel forward. One, crossing my dooryard not long ago, found his way barred by the house. Nothing daunted, he mounted the steps, traversed the platform and started upward. He left a long, silvery trail on the screen door and gained the wall. I watched him crawl past the eaves to the roof, and I have no doubt but that in the course of time he came down on the other side. Another of the same tribe I once found halted at the edge of a stream a few feet wide. I pushed him out on a chip and ferried him over, whereupon he started up the bank without a backward glance at me who had so opportunely played Providence for him. The rain must have slackened somewhat up above. There is less beating in, but the creek still roars turbulently. I have reached, in my clambering progress, a place where the water tosses itself joyfully over a great rock to fall into a deep, wide pool, so dark and so still that even the tumult of the storm seems hardly to have reached it. It is dim and green and quiet here; for the sunlight never penetrates to this spot. The tops of the hills seem almost to meet, two hundred feet above our heads, and the redwood growth is dense. The air is heavy with damp, woodsy fragrance and the water is almost black. We talk of Mother Earth, but we might with even more truth speak of Mother Water; for every evidence, to-day, is that the first life appeared, not from the soil, but nurtured at the broad breast of Mother Sea, even ere land had pushed its way up from ocean’s depths. The green scum on the surface of still pools; the slime molds covering moist bottoms, furnish us with some indication of what this primordial vegetation was like, but by what long process of evolution has come from that common ancestor the miniature forests of the mosses on yonder rocks, the ferns clothing the banks, the wild begonia here at my feet, the osiers yonder in the stream, the towering redwoods themselves, who can tell?