NEWS OF SPRING 



anything whatsoever. We are the last comers on this earth, 

 we simply find what has always existed and, like wonderstruck 

 children, we travel again the road which life had travelled 

 before us. For that matter, it is very natural and comfort- 

 ing that this should be so. But we will return to this point. 



8 



We must not leave the aquatic plants without briefly 

 mentioning the life of the most romantic of them all: the 

 legendary Vallisneria, an hydrocharad whose nuptials form 

 the most tragic episode in the love-history of the flowers. 

 The Vallisneria is a rather insignificant herb, possessing none 

 of the strange grace of the Water-lily or of certain submersed 

 verdant tresses. But it would seem as though nature had de- 

 lighted in imbuing it with a beautiful idea. Its whole ex- 

 istence is spent at the bottom of the water, in a sort of half- 

 slumber, until dawns the wedding-hour, when it aspires to a 

 new life. Then the female plant slowly uncoils its long pedun- 

 cular spiral, rises, emerges and floats and blossoms on the 

 surface of the pond. From a neighbouring stem, the male 

 flowers, which see it through the sunlit water, rise in their 

 turn, full of hope, towards the one that rocks, that awaits them, 



[38] 



