stalks wear a pointed nightcap, like that of the Elscolchia, like it splitting at the side when it falls off. Another, which creeps in long scaly light green lines about the roots of trees is the meadow Hypnum, and its likeness growing on walls the silken Hypnum.

The Bryum moss is not creeping like the Hypnum, but rather in little separate plants, growing as close together as possible, as thick as they can stick.

I have just pulled a little tuft off a brick in the churchyard wall, so small I could hardly carry it home, and yet containing no less than eleven perfect plants, their brown stalks as slender as a fly's leg, supporting little green urns covered by long pointed caps nearly half off, and clusters of the smallest green leaves imaginable round the root. All this I have seen without a glass, and so may you any day. I believe this is the bearded Bryum, but I will not make sure. One of these morsels of plants grows in quantities all over the walls of Jerusalem, and some have thought it might be the plant meant when we hear Solomon spoke of herbs from the hyssop that groweth out of the wall up to the cedar of Lebanon. The swan's-neck Bryum is dark green, growing in bogs; a dark moist plant it is, with more root than usual with mosses, bringing up quantities of wet mud with it, and generally where you see it looking smooth and cushiony is the most quaking place; the swan's-neck wants so little soil that it covers the loosest of all the mud, and if you set your foot on it a splash, and a leg painted with black peat, is sure to be the consequence. I fancy the green scaly moss of our woods is another Bryum, but I am not sure.

Club mosses also grow in bogs, they crawl about in long imbricated stems, that is, stems made of leaves fitting

one into the other, and have their capsules in large round brown heads at the end of the stems. They are called fox-tails, and always put me in mind of the fresh air of the mountains. These, like the swan's-neck, prepare the way for turning wet marsh into firm ground, for they begin to bind it and make it less watery, and in time fit to bear more useful plants. The unseen blossoms seem meant to prepare the way for others-the lichens.

The lichen is the last vestige of vegetable life, and also the first. Even in the arctic regions it contrives to grow upon the snow, and to cover it with a field of dazzling crimson, which has often amazed the northern traveller; it is the first upon the rock, the first to find out that man's hand is neglecting the constant rubbing and care that alone can keep off these most subtle and minute of created things. On the lichen feeds the moss; in the soft damp nests formed by decaying moss other seeds germinate; the chickweed, the tiny speedwell, the stone crop, insert their roots and find nourishment till nature, or rather nature's Master, has brought life out of death, beauty and vigour out of rottenness and decay.

Nay, perhaps to speak more truly, it is flesh alone that really corrupts; in the vegetable world, which partakes not equally of our doom of sin, decay is not so much real decay as a change of life. Before the last leaves have died away on the aged oak the rotten wood has become a whole garden of green flourishing plants, gathering round it, embracing it, and rendering its last years as lovely, though not perhaps as noble, as its prime.

CHAPTER X

NOVEMBER PLANTS

Ferns

We must still keep to the flowerless plants, and there are many of them which are exceedingly beautiful and full of interest.

First of these are the ferns, pretty green waving plants, which seem to be all leaf and nothing else; but these leaves, as they are commonly called, have not the some properties as those of the plants whose structure is visible, and botanists therefore named them fronds. Look under some high hedge or sheltered bank, and there you will find a profusion of long dark green shining leaves of a very firm leathery texture and with tough black stalks. This is the fern called hart's-tongue, and it is at this time in full blossom, if the brown seed-cases which it possesses may be called blossoms.

See here, on the under side of the leaf or frond, are a number of pale, brown, raised ridges, ranged with the utmost regularity along the veins of the frond, a long one and a short one alternately, and the brown colour contrasting very prettily with the green of the leaf. These brown ridges are cases; after a time they swell and burst,

disclosing a number of very tiny, round grains, which perhaps you might think were the seeds, but no such thing, they are only the purses that the seeds are in; and if we could look at them with such magnifying eyes as the dragon-fly wears we should see that they are shaped a good deal like an ancient helmet, and that they contain a multitude of seeds smaller and finer than dust. If you want a multiplication sum, you may find out how many seeds one hart's-tongue plant might bear in a year, reckoning each purse to contain fifty seeds, each ridge four thousand five hundred purses, each frond eighty ridges, and each root to produce twelve fronds! I only wonder what becomes of all that do not grow, and why the world is not one wood of hart's-tongue.

So small are the seeds that gathering them is a proverb for what is impossible; and, as we tell little children that if they can put salt on a bird's tail they can catch it, so it is another saying that by gathering fern seed you may make yourself invisible, both being what nobody has ever done.

The scaly hart's-tongue grows on old walls; its fronds are small and short, thickly covered with brown scales at the back, and of a curious zigzag form. They shrivel up to nothing without moisture, but spread out, broad and polished, as soon as a shower has refreshed them.

Per

The handsomest kind of English fern is the tall flowering fern which our Saxon ancestors named Osmond, after one of the titles of Thor, their god of thunder. haps it raised its high, firm, royal-looking fronds round his rude stone altars out far away on the moorland wastes, for it is chiefly found growing on the damp, boggy, stony moors, which seem to act like sponges to catch the water of the clouds and disperse it in streams and rivers from among the hills.

Though it is called the flowering fern the brown, granular appearance which forms a spike at the top of the frond is not really the blossom, it is only formed by the edges of the leaflets being curled in over the almost invisible ridge of purses.

In the gnarled heads of old pollards, in crevices of stone walls, or on the sides of quarries, you may often see the polypody, its green frond deeply divided into leaflets, the centre of those on one side coming just opposite to the division of those on the other. Here the purses are collected together in little round golden dots ranged regularly along the back of the leaflets. I like the polypody,

in spite of its ugly, half Greek, half English name, which means many feet; it is one of those cheerful, humble things that seems to have a kindness for what is venerable and excellent even in decay. It hangs round the

broken arch of the

aged hollow tree, and feathers up the ruined chapel, through autumn and winter, just as we should cheerfully, though soberly, hold fast to the old bulwarks of our faith and of our law, and do our best to adorn them by our adherence, though some may tell us that their bright summer day is gone and past and there are only winter storms to come.

Another fern which loves to deck the ruined wall, and which I first learnt to know among the old tombstones in the churchyard, is the black maiden-hair, a pretty little plant, its stalk jet black and tough as wire, the round leaflets arranged in pairs, with clusters of little black purses in round dots upon their backs. The roots, too, are very hard and black, and squeeze in perfectly flat between stones and bricks in the most determined way.

The black spleenwort and rue-leafed spleenwort are also often to be found with fronds of a very pretty