What is it?
Film fern, Hymenophyllum.

But what are you staring at now, with all your eyes?
Oh! that rock covered with green stars and a cloud of little white and pink flowers growing out of them.
Aha! my good little dog! I thought you would stand to that game when you found it.
What is it, though?
You must answer that yourself.

You have seen it a hundred times before.
Why, it is London Pride, that grows in the garden at home.
Of course it is: but the Irish call it St.Patrick's cabbage; though it got here a long time before St.Patrick; and St.Patrick must have been very short of garden-stuff if he ever ate it.
But how did it get here from London?
No, no.

How did it get to London from hence?
For from this country it came.

I suppose the English brought it home in Queen Bess's or James the First's time.
But if it is wild here, and will grow so well in England, why do we not find it wild in England too?
For the same reason that there are no toads or snakes in Ireland.