Stone seats still run round two sides of it; ivy
and stone-worts and grasses have picked the mortar from the walls and
clothed them, even as emerald moss and gray lichens and black and gold
glorify each piece of granite; a may-bush, tangled about a great shiny
ivy-tod, surmounts the western walls above the dried well; furzes and
heather and tall grasses soften the jagged outlines of the ruin, and above
a stone altar, at the east end of it, rises another white-thorn. At this
season of the year the subsequent floral glories of the little chapel were
only indicated: young briers already thrust their soft points over the
stone of the altar and the first leaves of foxgloves were unfolding, with
dandelions and docks, biting-stone-crop and ferns, ragged-robins and wild
geraniums. These infant things softened no outline yet. The flat paving of
the floor, where it yet remained, was bedded in grass; a little square
incision upon the stone of the altar glimmered full of water and reflected
the light from fleecy clouds which now climbed into heaven, bearing sunrise
fires upward over a pale blue sky.
Here, under the circumambient, sparkling clearness, coolness and silence,
Joan stood with strange medley of thoughts upon her soul. The saints and
the fairies mingled there with visions of Nature, always smiling, with a
vague shadow of one great God above the blue, but dim and very far away;
and a nearer picture which quickened her heart-beat: the picture of "Mister
Jan.
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