xii.] THE FALLING LEAF. 177 



of her agents to work to bring them back again into 

 her laboratory. It will take some months to do this, 

 but she will not be idle in the meantime; she has 

 always plenty of material in her magazines. She 

 wants them first to protect the seeds and plants from 

 that energetic servant of hers, the frost. Then they 

 are attacked by various beetles and other insects, and 

 gorgeous toadstools and other forms of fungi prey 

 upon them ; then the frost comes and helps, and 

 between them all they break up the tissues and 

 fibres, and even the very cells, of the leaf. And the 

 rain and dew, and the melting snow, carry the par- 

 ticles slowly down into her stores ready for her use. 



And from these remains she takes numbers of 

 beautiful crystals of phosphate and oxalate of lime, 

 and phosphoric and sulphuric acids; she also finds 

 many other substances there which she carefully 

 takes, and sends them through the tiny rootlets of 

 the trees and plants into the big roots and up into 

 the steins and branches. And here she forms them 

 again into leaf-buds and flower-buds. And the wind 

 and rain, the sun and dew, help them and bring them 

 fresh substances again, and the buds expand into leaf 

 and flower. 



And so they go on, never stopping; for though in 

 the cold, cheerless winter, when Nature herself seems 

 gone to sleep, it is only apparently so, for she is still 

 at work hard at work in her workshops preparing 

 the buds and blossoms for the coming spring. And 

 then we see the value of these crystals from the dead 

 leaves, in the beautiful silken flowers of the Crocus, 

 the bright yellow blooms of the Cowslip and Prini- 



M 



