in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat pattern live timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity.  But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs—­and some of them have a good many—­rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.

—­The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very familiar way,—­at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I sometimes think it necessary to repress,—­that I was coming it rather strong on the butterflies.

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images, the butterfly as well as the others.  The stone is ancient error.  The grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its color by it.  The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it.  He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one.  The next year stands for the coming time.  Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken, rise in its full stature and native hues, in the sunshine.  Then shall God’s minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity.  Then shall beauty—­Divinity taking outlines and color—­light upon the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beautified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.

You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.

* * * * *

=_212._= PLEASURES OF BOATING.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining for many a long road behind me.  To lie still, over the Flats, where the waters are