keletons of Alps whose death began
Far in the multitudinous centuries."

Little is left them but a kind of dreary grandeur. The sunshine falls
on patches of gleaming snow and trailing mist, and lights up the grey
crags which start out like mushrooms on the barren slopes. On all
sides streams tear down over beds of the loose shingle, of which they
carry away thousands of tons winter after winter. Their brawling is
perhaps the only sound you will hear through slow-footed afternoons,
save, always, the whistle or sighing of the persistent wind. A stunted
beech bush clothes the spurs here and there, growing short and thick
as a fleece of dark wool. After a storm the snow will lie powdering
the green beech trees, making the rocks gleam frostily and sharpening
the savage ridges till they look like the jagged edges of stone axes.
Only at nightfall in summer do the mountains take a softer aspect.
Then in the evening stillness the great outlines show majesty; then
in the silence after sunset rivers, winding among the ranges in many
branches over broad, stony beds, fill the shadowy valleys with their
hoarse murmur.

To the flock-owner, however, this severe region is what the beautiful
West is not--it is useful. Sheep can find pasture there. And as the
mountains decline into hills, and the hills into downs and flats, the
covering of herbage becomes less and less scanty. When the colonists
came to the east coast, they found plains and dales which were open,
grassy, almost treeless. Easy of access, and for the most part
fertile, they were an ideal country for that unaesthetic person,
the practical settler. Flocks and herds might roam amongst the pale
tussock grass of the slopes and bottoms without fear either of man,
beast, climate, or poisonous plant.[1] A few wooden buildings and
a certain extent of wire fencing represented most of the initial
expenses of the pioneer. Pastoral settlement speedily overran such a
land, followed more slowly and partially by agriculture. The settler
came, not with axe and fire to ravage and deform, but as builder,
planter and gardener. Being in nineteen cases out of twenty a Briton,
or a child of one, he set to work to fill this void land with
everything British which he could transport or transplant His gardens
were filled with the flowers, the vegetables, the fruit trees of the
old land. The oak, the elm, the willow, the poplar, the spruce, the
ash grew in his plantations. His cattle were Shortho