JANUARY 11 



little group, some standing on the snow in sunny nooks 

 under the leafless alder copse, others floating on the 

 placid surface all perfect pictures of security and 

 content. 



IV 



There is a special reason just now for the content of 

 wildfowl in this sanctuary, because of the extraordinary 

 growth of the Canadian pond- weed. It must 

 have come there as a fragment adhering Canadian 

 to the plumage of some travelling duck, P nd ' weed 

 for it does not exist anywhere else within a radius of 

 forty miles. One would say that there was danger of 

 the whole lake being turned into a morass, so dense 

 and all-prevailing are the masses of vegetation ; but 

 experience has shown that this strange exotic disappears 

 as quickly as it comes. When first introduced to a 

 sheet of water, it multiplies with prodigious rapidity, 

 and threatens to choke all the channel ; but in two or 

 three seasons the soil becomes exhausted, the weed 

 shrinks into a verdant carpet at the bottom, till, after 

 the lapse of ten or a dozen years, the soil has recovered 

 strength to send up another vast crop, which passes 

 away in like manner as the first. 



The introduction of this weed (Elodea canadensis) 

 into European waters is part of the romance of botany. 

 It is said that a Cambridge professor, having received 

 some specimens from a botanical friend in Canada, 

 incautiously left them in his wash-hand basin, whence 

 they were emptied by an over-diligent housemaid into 

 that bourne whence no specimen returns. A few years 



