THE WALK. 35

 

Climbing places. The tall ferns.

there, and shelving projections from the precipices,
formed with broken stratifications at the sides of them,
by means of which it was easy to climb up, and with flat
surfaces at the top, where it was easy to stand. The
children ascended a great many of these elevations,
partly for the sake of the new views which they thus ob-
tained of the surrounding scenery, and partly because it
was a pleasure in itself to be up so high.

All this scenery seemed to the children extremely grand
and sublime, much more so even than it would have ap-
peared to grown persons, if grown persons had been there.
For as we necessarily and instinctively compare the mag-
nitude of objects around us with our own size, it follows
that a tree or a rock that is fifty feet high, appears to a
child who is three feet high, as tall and large as one of a
hundred feet would to a man of six. Soa shelving-rock
as high as a man’s head, appears to aman who passes by
it as nothing extraordinary. It is only a leaning wall,—
one which he looks down upon. The child, on the other
hand, creeps under it, and ldoks wp with a species of awe
to what is to him a dangerous precipice. In the same
manner, if there were such a being as a giant as tall as a
mountain, the mountain would, of course, appear to him
only as a little hillock as high as his head.

Thus it happened that in this walk the trees, and
rocks, and precipices, and glens, imposing as they would
have appeared to any one, presented to the children, and
especially to Malleville, an aspect in the highest degree
grand and sublime.

In many places the path passed through beds of fern
or of tall grass, which brushed the dresses of the children
as they passed along, but this did no harm, as the grass

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