A friend of mine had once a strange dream; he seemed to himself to be walking in a day of high summer on a grassy moorland leading up to some fantastically piled granite crags. He made his way slowly thither; it was terribly hot there among the sun-warmed rocks, and he found a little natural cave, among the great boulders, fringed with fern. There he sate for a long time while the sun passed over, and a little breeze came wandering up the moor. Opposite him as he sate was the face of a great pile of rocks, and while his eye dwelt upon it it suddenly began to wink and glisten with little moving points, dots so minute that he could hardly distinguish them. Suddenly, as if at a signal, the little points dropped from the rock, and the whole surface seemed alive with gossamer threads, as if a silken, silvery curtain had been let down; presently the little dots reached the grass and began to crawl over it; and then he saw that each of them was attached to one of the fine threads; and he thought that they were a colony of minute spiders, living on the face of the rocks. He got up to see this wonder close at hand, but the moment he moved, the whole curtain was drawn up with incredible swiftness, as if the threads were highly elastic; and when he reached the rock, it was as hard and solid as before, nor could he discover any sign of the little creatures. "Ah," he said to himself in the dream, "that is the meaning of the _living_ rock!" and he became aware, he thought, that all rocks and stones on the surface of the earth must be thus endowed with life, and that the rocks were, so to speak, but the shell that contained these innumerable little creatures, incredibly minute, living, silken threads, with a small head, like boring worms, inhabiting burrows which went far into the heart of the granite, and each with a strong retractile power. I told this dream to a geologist the other day, who laughed, "An ingenious idea," he said, "and there may even be something in it! It is not by any means certain that stones do not have a certain obscure life of their own; I have sometimes thought that their marvellous cohesion may be a sign of life, and that if life were withdrawn, a mountain might in a moment become a heap of sliding sand." My friend said that the dream made such an impression upon him that for a time he found it hard to believe that stones and rocks had not this strange and secret life lurking in their recesses; and indeed it has since stood to me as a symbol of life, haunting and penetrating all the very hardest and driest things. It seems to me that just as there are almost certainly more colours than our eyes can perceive, and sounds either too acute or too deliberate for our ears to hear, so the domain of life may be much further extended in the earth, the air, the waters, than we can tangibly detect.