TROIIP III FE R TILE FRONDS UNIFORMLY SOMEWHAT LEAF-LIKE, 

 YET DIFFERING NOTICEABLY FROM STERILE FRONDS 



Late in August the plant has reached a stately 

 height, perhaps of three or four feet. The fronds 

 are still smooth and delicate to a degree unusual 

 even in ferns. But they wear a deeper green, and 

 their texture seems a trifle more substantial. Oc- 

 casionally, though rarely in the deeper woods, we 

 find a frond which is conspicuously longer-stalked, 

 taller, narrower than the others, with pinnae more 

 distant and more contracted. A glance at its lower 

 surface discovers double rows of brown, linear fruit- 

 dots. 



Though one of the largest of its tribe, the Nar- 

 row-leaved Spleenwort suggests greater fragility, 

 a keener sensitiveness to uncongenial conditions, 

 than any other of our native ferns. A storm which 

 leaves the other inhabitants of the forest almost un- 

 touched beats down its fronds, tender and perish- 

 able even in maturity. 



This very fragility, accompanied as it is with 

 beauty of form and color, in the midst of the some- 

 what coarse and hardy growth of the August woods, 

 lends the plant a peculiar charm. 



I find it growing beneath great basswoods, lichen- 

 spotted beeches, and sugar maples with trunks branch- 

 less for fifty feet, soaring like huge shipmasts into 

 the blue above. 



Almost the only flowers in its neighborhood, for 

 in midsummer wood-flowers are rare, are the tiny 

 pink blossoms of the herb Robert, that invincible 

 little plant which never wearies in well-doing, but 

 persists in flowering from June till October, the 



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