dishonestly, or malignantly, our thoughts will die like evil fungi,--dripping corrupt dew. 13. But farther. If you have walked moorlands enough to know the look of them, you know well those flat spaces or causeways of bright green or golden ground between the heathy rock masses; which signify winding pools and inlets of stagnant water caught among the rocks;--pools which the deep moss that covers them--_blanched_, not black, at the root,--is slowly filling and making firm; whence generally the unsafe ground in the moorland gets known by being _mossy_ instead of heathy; and is at last called by its riders, briefly, 'the Moss': and as it is mainly at these same mossy places that the riding is difficult, and brings out the gifts of horse and rider, and discomfits all followers not similarly gifted, the skilled crosser of them got his name, naturally, of 'moss-rider,' or moss-trooper. In which manner the moss of Norway and Scotland has been a taskmaster and Maker of Soldiers, as yet, the strongest known among natural powers. The lightning may kill a man, or cast down a tower, but these little tender leaves of moss--they and their progenitors--have trained the Northern Armies. 14. So much for the human meaning of that decay of the leaves. Now to go back to the little creatures themselves. It seems that the upper part of the moss fibre is {21} especially _un_decaying among leaves; and the lower part, especially decaying. That, in fact, a plant of moss-fibre is a kind of persistent state of what is, in other plants, annual. Watch the year's growth of any luxuriant flower. First it comes out of the ground all fresh and bright; then, as the higher leaves and branches shoot up, those first leaves near the ground get brown, sickly, earthy,--remain for ever degraded in the dust, and under the dashed slime in rain, staining, and grieving, and loading them with obloquy of envious earth, half-killing them,--only life enough left in them to hold on the stem, and to be guardians of the rest of the plant from all they suffer;--while, above them, the happier leaves, for whom they are thus oppressed, bend freely to the sunshine, and drink the rain pure. The moss strengthens on a diminished scale, intensifies, and makes perpetual, these two states,--bright leaves above that never wither, leaves beneath that exist only to wither. 15. I have hitherto spoken only of the fading moss as it is needed for change into earth. But I am not sure whether a yet more important office, in its days of age, be not its use as a colour. We are all thankful enough--as far as we ever are so--for green moss, and yellow moss. But we are never enough grateful for black moss. The golden would be nothing without it, nor even the grey.