Page:A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf.djvu/25

Rh of Pecatonica. … To me all plants are more precious than before. My poor eye is not better, nor worse. A cloud is over it, but in gazing over the widest landscapes, I am not always sensible of its presence.”

By the end of August Mr. Muir was back again in Indianapolis. He had found it convenient to spend a “botanical week” among his University friends in Madison. So keen was his interest in plants at this time that an interval of five hours spent in Chicago was promptly turned to account in a search for them. “I did not find many plants in her tumultuous streets,” he complains; “only a few grassy plants of wheat, and two or three species of weeds,—amaranth, purslane, carpet-weed, etc.,—the weeds, I suppose, for man to walk upon, the wheat to feed him. I saw some green algae, but no mosses. Some of the latter I expected to see on wet walls, and in seams on the pavements. But I suppose that the manufacturers smoke and the terrible noise are too great for the hardiest of them. I wish I knew