CHAPTER VIII 

 RUSHES AND SEDGES 



"When as the breezes pass 

 The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways." 



Lowell. 



THE wind has many fosterlings in the out- 

 door world, but the grasses, rushes, and sedges are, 

 in a peculiar sense, his own. 



The grasses grow in prairies and open fields. 

 The rushes are most abundant on roadsides and 

 river-shores, and in bogs and moist meadows, and 

 while some sedges live on the low-lying banks of 

 brooks and ditches, others are found in marshes, 

 on sea-beaches, and on mountain-tops, above the 

 tree-line. So the grasses, rushes, and sedges 

 generally prefer the breeziest situations which the 

 countryside affords. 



The wind is the author of their being, for 

 their flowers, for untold generations, have been 

 wind-fertilized. 



And the wind has moulded them, for the 



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