Much of this powdered rock is washed by rain into the lakes and ponds; in time these cut their exits down, and drain, leaving each a broad mud-flat. The climate mildens and the south winds cease not, so that wind-borne grasses soon make green meadows of the broad lake-bottom flats.

The process climbs the hill-slopes; every little earthy foothold for a plant is claimed by some new settler, until each low hill is covered to the top with vegetation graded to its soil, and where the flowering kinds cannot establish themselves, the lichen pioneers still maintain their hold. Rarely, in the landscape, now, is any of the primitive colour of the rocks; even the tall, straight cliffs of Aylmer are painted and frescoed with lichens that flame and glitter with purple and orange, silver and gold. How precious and fertile the ground is made to seem, when every square foot of it is an exquisite elfin garden made by the little people, at infinite cost, filled with dainty flowers and still later embellished with delicate fruit.

One of the wonderful things about these children of the Barrens is the great size of fruit and flower compared with the plant. The cranberry, the crowberry, the cloudberry, etc., produce fruit any one of which might outweigh the herb itself.

Nowhere does one get the impression that these are weeds, as often happens among the rank growths farther south. The flowers in the wildest profusion are generally low, always delicate and mostly in beds of a single species. The Lalique jewelry was the sensation of the Paris Exposition of 1899. Yet here is Lalique renewed and changed for every week in the season and lavished on every square foot of a region that is a million square miles in extent.

Not a cranny in a rock but is seized on at once by the eager little gardeners in charge and made a bed of bloom, as though every inch of room were priceless. And yet Nature here exemplifies the law that our human gardeners are only learning: "Mass your bloom, to gain effect."

As I stood on that hill, the foreground was a broad stretch of old gold—the shining sandy yellow of drying grass—but it was patched with large scarlet mats of arctous that would put red maple to its reddest blush. There was no Highland heather here, but there were whole hillsides of purple red vaccinium, whose leaves were but a shade less red than its luscious grape-hued fruit.

Here were white ledums in roods and acre beds; purple mairanias by the hundred acres, and, framed in lilac rocks, were rich, rank meadows of golden-green by the mile.

There were leagues and leagues of caribou moss, pale green or lilac, and a hundred others in clumps, that, seeing here the glory of the painted mosses, were simulating their ways, though they themselves were the not truly mosses at all.

I never before saw such a realm of exquisite flowers so exquisitely displayed, and the effect at every turn throughout the land was colour, colour, colour, to as far outdo the finest autumn tints of New England as the Colorado Canyon outdoes the Hoosac Gorge. What Nature can do only in October, elsewhere, she does here all season through, as though when she set out to paint the world she began on the Barrens with a full palette and when she reached the Tropics had nothing left but green.

Thus at every step one is wading through lush grass or crushing prairie blossoms and fruits. It is so on and on; in every part of the scene, there are but few square feet that do not bloom with flowers and throb with life; yet this is the region called the Barren Lands of the North.