THE GREEN WORLD 229 



seems specially developed in the cleaving and clamber- 

 ing plants that are striving upwards in the thickets of 

 early summer. Then, in all our hedges on the chalk, 

 cleavers or goosegrass is shooting up, line upon line 

 of it, and the twining fingers of the traveller's joy 

 above are clasping at the air. These feeling fingers 

 will clasp other fingers, petioles even of the same 

 parent stem ; for it is a trait of traveller's joy that, 

 once above the hedge top, its thousand fingers inter- 

 twine and interclasp. Traveller's joy is one of the 

 most independent of climbers. Its lower stems 

 steadied in the body of the hedge, it wants no further 

 support from neighbour or rival. It throws up a 

 great mass of flowering stems above the hedge, and 

 these simply wreathe and twist about each, making 

 the great clematis tangle in which the linnets and 

 greenfinches rear second broods. 



Not that traveller's joy is peculiar in this independ- 

 ence. It is to be seen in many lowlier things ; seen 

 in the hairy tare ; to disentangle the grappling 

 tendrils and slender branches of a group of hairy 

 tares is harder than to disentangle a confusion of 

 old gut casting lines and flies pressed in a many- 

 knotted bunch. It is odd to notice the fingers of the 

 climbers feeling towards each other whilst they are 

 still inches apart. The plant has no power to see its 

 neighbour on whom it may depend for support. How 

 does it become conscious of this unseen neighbour, and 

 begin to grow towards it ? We notice the single, long, 



