The rabbits, hiding in the tangled thickets above, and whose spring-water ran in the glen below, made a path around it, through the concealing grass and cedar boughs that brushed their furry coats. None would cross this bare spot, hot to their feet in summer and freezing to them in winter, where they would be stared at by every bird, or hunted by the eyes of men. Even the crows drew their line there, and would not fly over it; for the crow makes no path in the sky above that does not parallel a path of supplies below. Often had I seen the Jersey herd, brown and gray and chocolate, browsing in a phalanx, following the earliest grass which grew closest to the rocks, come to the very border of this scar in the cheek of the earth and then in sudden anger plunge in and seek the cedars on the hill, anywhere to forget this outrage on Nature! I remember the spring I first saw the stone-crop. The winter had been long and raw. Even the blue grass had had a struggle to keep green, and the cedars’ stems had become black under the bite of frost. But blacker yet lay the earth’s scar beyond them. Then one day in the spring I went over the hill to Tammas’s home. As I came up from the slope and out from the great lindens, and looked across at the other hill for the ugly scar, I stopped thrilled with a strange and nameless beauty. I have no word for the exultation that swept over me. But I remembered when Elizabeth Browning was dying—she so unbeautiful in face and so star-like in mind,—she uttered a poem which seemed to me to surpass all that great woman ever wrote. For the characters in it were she, her husband, and her God: and the subject was The Beauty of Immortality. "How do you feel, dearest?" he asked, holding her in his arms and looking into her dying face. "Oh, I feel beautiful," she said, as she smiled back into his face and died. Oh, frail little woman, who never wrote a weak line! O, earth-bound and earth-found one, who never created save of heaven! O, little homely one, whose portrait I did not till then even love to recall, so different it seemed from the soul which could write as it wrote: now it hangs the most beautiful thing on my study wall. I stood there, looking, steeped in the thrill of it. I thought a pink rainbow had fallen across the hills. Then the nobility of this pink flower went into me, for there is nobleness even among flowers and trees. The blue grass is the aristocrat, who sits only at the richest tables, with cedars to wait on him, refreshed with the waters of a thousand hills. The bermuda runs hither and yon, sending its stolons after the fat things of earth; and the redtop grows only where it can reach the richest granaries. The stone-crop alone clings to this bare brown rock, shielding its poverty.