_Caran-cheann-air-chrith_, ‘little friend of the quaking-grass,’ is one of the Gaelic names of the wagtail, perhaps given to it because of a like tremulous movement, as though invisible wings of gossamer shook ever in a secret wind. Or given to it, perhaps, because of a legend which puts the common grass, the quaking-grass, the wagtail, the cuckoo, the aspen, and the lichen in one traditional company. In the Garden of Gethsemane, so runs the Gaelic folk-tale as I heard it as a child, all Nature suddenly knew the Sorrow of Christ. The dew whispered it: it was communicated in the dusk: in pale gold and shaken silver it stole from moon and star into the green darkness of cypress and cedar. The grass-blades put all their green lips into one breath, and sighed _Peace, Brother!_ Christ smiled in His sorrow, and said, _Peace to you for ever._ But here and there among the grasses, as here and there among the trees, and as here and there among the husht birds, were those who doubted, saying, ‘It is but a man who lies here. His sorrow is not our sorrow.’ Christ looked at them, and they were shaken with the grief of all grief and the sorrow of all sorrow. And that is why to this day the quaking-grass and the aspen are forever a-tremble, and why the wagtail has no rest but quivers along the earth like a dancing shadow. But to those mosses of Gethsemane which did not give out the sympathy of their kin among the roots of cedar and oak, and to the cuckoo who rang from her nest a low chime of _All’s well! All’s well!_ Christ’s sorrowful eyes when He rose at dawn could not be endured. So the cuckoo rose and flew away across the Hill of Calvary, ringing through the morning twilight the bells of sorrow, and from that day was homeless and without power anywhere to make a home of her own. As for the mosses that had refused love, they wandered away to desolate places and hung out forlorn flags of orange-red and pale-yellow and faded-silver along the grey encampments of the rocks. Often I have thought of this when lying in the mountain-grass beside one of those ancient lichened boulders which strew our hillsides. The lichen is the least of the grasses--and let us use the term in its poetic sense--but how lovely a thing it is; almost as lovely in endless variety of form as the frost-flower. In a sense they are strangely akin, these two; the frost-flower, which is the breath of Beauty itself, lasting a briefer hour than the noontide dew, and the moss-flower which the barren rock sustains through all the changing seasons.