Rare, lovely mosses and bits of most delicate ferns,
maidenhair and lady-bracken, tiny trails of wintergreen and arbutus,
filled a great shallow Indian china dish upon her bureau top, and grew,
in their fairy fashion, in the clear, soft water she kept them freshened
with.
Shining scraps of mountain minerals--garnets and bright-tinted quartz
and beryls, heaped artistically, rather than scientifically, on a base
of jasper and malachite and dark basalt and glistening spar and curious
fossils; these not gathered by any means in a single summer or in
ordinary ramblings, but treasured long, and standing, some of them, for
friendly memories--balanced on the one side a like grouping of shells
and corals and sea-mosses on the other, upon a broad bracket-mantel put
up over a little corner fireplace; for Miss Craydocke's room, joining
the main house, took the benefit of one of its old chimneys.
Above or about the pictures lay mossy, gnarled, and twisted branches,
gray and green, framing them in a forest arabesque; and great pine
cones, pendent from their boughs, crowned and canopied the mirror.
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