Descriptive letterpress printed opposite this photograph:

FERNS AND MOSSES.

DEVONSHIRE is the real fern-paradise. It abounds in warm, moist, and shady nooks; and ferns delight in warmth, moisture, and shade. Though they love the warmth, they avoid the sun as much as any maiden rejoicing in a superlatively beautiful complexion, for their delicate fronds also become shrivelled and discoloured in its rays. But this is not the case with all their varieties, for even the ferns are changeable in their moods and fickle in their attachments, differing from one another in their habits and modes of growth. Amongst the most graceful and beautiful of the many forms of vegetable life are the ferns! Without gorgeousness of colouring, their beauty of form endows them with a tender and romantic grace. To study them is one of the most seductive pursuits, and their cultivation is fast becoming a popular passion. Ferns will grow where flowering plants would perish. Let them have but moisture and shade, and they will grow in the window sill of the humblest dwelling; will grow and unfold their sweet, feathery forms with all their natural grace in the presence of squalor and misery; will minister to the love of nature, and beauty, and purity, dear to many a lowly, toil-worn, yet uncorrupted life.

The numerous varieties of British ferns is beyond our purpose to describe. That in our illustration is the Hard Fern, a variety which, though it has not the gracefulness of the Lady Fern, in whose company it is frequently found, yet has a certain rigid elegance and simplicity combined with a beautiful shining colour, which atones for its want of feathery grace. Ferns love to dive down and spread their roots under the crevices of rocks and boulder-stones. And then the mosses that grow on those stones! What of these? asks the eloquent author of “Modern Painters.” No words will say what mosses are. ” None are delicate enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green, the traceries of intricate silver and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace.” ” They will not conceal the form of the rock they cherish, but gather over it * * * following with unimaginable fineness of gentle growth the undulation of the stone they cherish, until it is charged with colour so that it can receive no more, and instead of looking rugged, or cold, or stern, as anything that a rock is held to be at heart, it seems to be clothed with a soft, dark leopard-skin, embroidered with arabesque of purple and silver.”