Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/141

Hosmer (rough-cast) house, I thought I never saw any bank so handsome as the russet hillside behind it. It is a very barren, exhausted soil where the cladonia lichens abound, and the lower side is a flowing sand, but this russet grass, with its weeds, being saturated with moisture, was, in this light, the richest brown, methought, that I ever saw. There was the pale brown of the grass, red-brown of some weeds (sarothra and pinweed, probably), dark brown of huckleberry and sweet fern stems, and the very visible green of the cladonias, thirty rods off, and the rich brown fringes where the broken sod hung over the sand-bank. . . . . On some knolls these vivid and rampant lichens, as it were, dwarf the oaks. A peculiar and unaccountable light seemed to fall on that bank or hillside, though it was thick storm all around. A sort of Newfoundland sun seemed to be shining on it. It was such a light that you looked round for the sun from which it might come. . . . . It was a prospect to excite a reindeer. These tints of brown were as softly and richly fair and sufficing as the most brilliant autumnal tints. In fair and dry weather these spots may be commonplace. But now they are worthy to tempt the painter's brush. The picture should be the side of a barren, lichen-clad hill with a flowing sand-bank be-