3 io NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FARM 



Where burrowing crawfishes abound, their holes will be 

 found some of them capped over with mud chimneys since 

 the drought began. We can test the depth to which the 

 water-level in the soil has descended by probing the craw- 

 fish holes with a stick. 



Where we lose the channel of the brook, 

 as we pass out into a small grassy flood-plain, 

 we find that though there is no water in sight, 

 there is moisture in the soil. Such soil-gather- 

 ing things as the fowl-meadow-grass (fig. 135) 

 are making the most of the situation ; they are 

 covering the plain with a tangle of stems that 

 will strain out of subsequent floods their burden 

 of silt and trash. Thus will the plain be built 

 a little higher; another layer will be added to 

 form rich moisture-holding soil. 



By the side of the brook gone dry, nature 

 sets us examples in the conservation of 

 moisture. There we may find plants burned 

 to death with the drouth; others of the same 

 species wilted sadly, but still alive; and others, 

 green and flourishing. The differences are 

 mainly due to the disposition of the soil about 

 F Tn g 13 pamc F e rU of their roots; soil hard and bare in the first case, 

 o^-gf aS. mead " and well adapted to facilitate loss of water; 

 and loose soil well covered from the sun in 

 the last case, and full of reserve moisture. 



Somewhere, along our brook, we may come upon a reedy 

 swale now dry enough to walk across, but never dry enough 

 for field-crops, and therefore left unmolested by the plow. 

 It is apt to be filled with sedges and marsh ferns, with a 

 few cat-tails in the wettest spots, and to have round about, 

 a fringe of moisture-loving composites such as boneset, joe- 

 pye weed, swamp-milkweed, goldenrod and New England 



