The Sleeping of the Fields 367 



bricks do in a house-wall, pressed closely together 

 in horizontal rows (Fig. 99*2). Sometimes they con- 

 tain a brownish, granular 

 substance, but oftener they 

 are, in the expressive phrase 

 once used by a daughter of 

 Erin, " full of emptiness," 

 and in this case they may be 

 much bent and crinkled. FIG. 99 a. Cork cells. 



(From the leaf-scar of the horse- 

 The COrk layer which chestnut much magnified.) 



severs the leaf from the bough does its work 

 gently. At first it is not an unbroken sheet of 

 cells, but a thin, incomplete, and porous plate, 

 which intersects the softer tissues of the leaf-stalk 

 but does not cut across the bundles of fibres and 

 vessels which are the vital connection between 

 bough and leaf. 



At about the same time, or a little later in the 

 season, another change takes place in the tissues of 

 the leaf-stem. Now just outside the forming cork- 

 plate there is a narrow band of rounded cells, which 

 lie loosely together with many empty spaces among 

 them. This is the "absciss" or "cutting-off" layer, 

 and just here the stem-tissue is very easily ruptured. 



By October the corky scale at the base of each 

 leaf-stalk has gained its full thickness, and severs 



