Of a summer day this tiny bowl is a mile-deep sapphire, holding the sky in its heart. When thunder clouds hang threatening over it, it is a black pearl with evanescent gleams of silver playing in its calm depths; and always the dense green of the swamp cedars that rim its golden bog-edge round are a setting of Alexandrite stone such as they mine in the heart of the Ceylon mountains, decked with lighter pencilings of chrysoprase and beryl. And some man, looking upon all this, saw only the mud beneath it! Probably he trotted the bog and only knew the wickets of the _Nesæa verticillata_ were there because they tripped him. And I’ll warrant the goblins, sitting cross-legged in the deepest shadows of the cedars, waiting for midnight and their game, mocked him with elfin laughter--and all he heard was frogs. Looking down upon it this brilliant February day, with a tiny cloud drawn across the sun, it was a pearl. The winter and the distance made the bog edging pure gold in which it shone with all the white radiance of its opaque, foot-thick ice. Anon the sun came out and what had been a pearl gathered subtle fires of blue and red in its crystalline heart and flashed opaline tints back at me that changed again as I plunged down the hill toward it, and it lay a Norwegian sunstone shooting forth fire-yellow glows as the rays of the sun caught the right angle. Nor was the ice less beautiful when I stood on it. Here opaqueness wove sprightly patterns with crystalline purity. The surface was smooth under foot and yet these patterns rose and fell in the ice itself, and it was hard to believe they were not carved intaglio and then the surface iced over to a level. It was no prettier ice than I had crossed on the big pond, but its setting brought out the beauty. Ice grown old, after all, is far more beautiful than young ice. Character is built into it. Living has taught it the highest form of art, which is to repeat beauty without sameness. What designs might the makers of floor coverings win from this surface if they would but study it, and how trite and tame in comparison seem their tiresome interweaving of square and circle and their endless repetition! This solid floor, woven by winter witchery, goes on through the spongy surface of the bog, mingling with it, yet by some necromancy never interfering with its own intricate patterns of growth. The sphagnum fluffs up through it with its delicate fiber unharmed. The pitcher plants sit jauntily holding their ewers to the sky, filled with ice instead of water, to be sure, but uncracked and waiting in rows as if for bogle bellboys to rush with them to unseen guests. I found one flower-scape with its nodding head still persistent. The seed pod had cracked along the sides, but the umbrella-like style was still there, opened and inverted, and it had caught many of the seeds that the pod had spilled and was holding them for a more favorable season, without doubt.