Everything seemed to toss it about. It was girt round by immensities, which might be azure or glittering with gold in summer, pallid dull or menacing in winter, silent as the abyss by night, and terrible with a myriad of unknown noises in the day; but nothing daunted it. Within its tiny form it held other visions, greater yet, visions and million-old memories of the childhood of the world, when the waves moaned in another measure, and the agony of the vision of earth was different. So it waited the favourable event which would give it life: or the sign of dissolution, to presage its death. The light beating of a bird's wings, one dawn, had began its career by flinging it out of the tiny shelter (a crevice in a low branch of the mother-tree) from which the mightiest winds had been unable in long years to tear it. It was falling in slow gyrations through the green air, across the red-barred dawn-fires of the sun, when a quick breath of wind lifted its mossy form and carried it, from near the ground, far out into space. In its flight it grazed, time and again, the rude bark of trees, sank to ground level, skimmed it, and rose once more before it fell at last upon the polished surface of a stone, where it lay till dark and through the night till the next noon. The air above it was heavy with the humming of insects, and around stretched the very old forest, vibrant with life. The merest trifle might have carried this tiny seed of Californian pine a few inches farther, where lay fat moist soil, good for tree-growth; but such was not its lot. The vast and shining EYE which oversees the dizzy spectacle of the universe, and comprehends it in its dreadful whole as in its least bewildering detail, this EYE had doubtless not lost sight of it. Suddenly all light around was blotted out: a great mass overwhelmed it and carried it away with heavy abrupt movements. It felt itself embedded in a soft warm substance, among grains of sand, dead leaves and grass, which were picked up now and then from the ground, carried awhile, and dropped (only to be replaced by others), in a sequence of rudely rhythmical movement. The pine-seed had been caught up in the frog of an animal's foot, fixed in it deeply, so that it was not till after many days at last delivered, when the beast waded across a brook and left the seed on a dry sand-bank, near sunset, in the deep glow of the evening rays.