32 THE DAILY LIFE OF OJJU FARM. 



soms. " It's only the worms, sir," remarked my com- 

 panion, with an indifferent air. But methought there 

 must be a reason for it, which I should like to dis- 

 cover. One knows the beautiful provision whereby 

 Nature secures the enrichment and accumulation of 

 soil through the worms drawing down leaves, curled as 

 an incipient cheroot, into their burrow. Each plant is 

 a compound product of aliment drawn from the air and 

 soil : these two, philosophers term the vegetable and 

 mineral elements, of which (when you bum a leaf or 

 stem) the vegetable flies off back to its native air in 

 smoke, and the ashes remaining form the mineral por- 

 tion. Obvious, then, is the benefit of the worms 

 drawing thickly down the falling leaves, whether to 

 line their apartments, or to supply their larder, for the 

 same reason as mankind ploughs-in green growing- 

 mustard in preparation for wheat ; but whatever could 

 the meaning be of these long stalks being hauled 

 gradually down? Were they to chew, as celery, or 

 be stewed, as rhubarb ? Or were the fibres to be bent 

 into crinoline-hoops for the lady-worm ? or be fitted as 

 handles to chibouques for the gentlemen ? or, to prop, 

 as pillars, the piazza of some subterranean Parthenon ? 

 or to be woven into gabions against the invading mole ? 

 Whatever it meant we are puzzled to this moment, as 

 it was only in the neighbourhood of this one bed of 

 shrubs that the phenomenon occurred. It must clearly 

 be an " ile " region of some sort, of which a lucky 

 colony has been making the most. Alas ! that their 

 days are numbered ; for we cannot, after all, allow the 

 untidiness of their earthy deposits (" worm-casts," as 

 they are called by White, of Selboume, who pronounces 

 them, being "the worm's excrement, to be a fine 



