And the Professor showed the whites of his eyes
devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.
I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature
through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap
up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth
which was green once. The trees look down from the hill-sides and
ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe,--"What are these people
about?" And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper
back,--"We will go and see." So the small herbs pack themselves up
in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to
them at night and whispers, "Come with me." Then they go softly
with it into the great city,--one to a cleft in the pavement, one
to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich
gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where
nothing but a man is buried,--and there they grow, looking down on
the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between
the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-
railings. Listen to them, when there is only a light breath
stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other,--"Wait
awhile!" The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green
lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach
the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each
other,--"Wait awhile!" By-and-by the flow of life in the streets
ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants--the smaller tribes always in
front--saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very
tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each
other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to
be picked out of the granite to find them food.
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