202 THE STOEY OF THE PLANTS. 



immediately set their seeds in the flat green 

 capsule, ripen the^a rapidly in the eye of the 

 sun, and shed them at once, the whole life of the 

 plant thus seldom exceeding three or four weeks 

 in a favourable season. At the same time, the 

 leaves and roots wither, as the material they 

 contained is rapidly withdrawn from them, and 

 used up in the process of maturing the seeds ; so 

 that as soon as the fruiting is quite complete, 

 the plant dies down, having exhausted itself 

 utterly in the two short acts of flowering and 

 seed-bearing. During the remaining ten months 

 of the year or thereabouts, there are no more 

 whitlow-grasses at all in existence ; the species 

 remains dormant, as it were, for a whole long 

 period in the form of seeds lying buried in the 

 soil, and only springs to life again when the 

 return of March gives it warning that its day 

 has once more come round to it. 



Contrast with this brief and very spasmodic 

 life of some thirty days the comparatively long 

 though otherwise extremely similar biography 

 of the Mexican agave, commonly cultivated in 

 hothouses in England, and largely grown in 

 the open air in the South of Europe under 

 the (incorrect) name of *' American aloes." 

 The agave is a large and strikingly handsome 

 lily of the amaryllis family, about which I have 

 already told you something in a previous chapter. 

 It begins life as a small plant, like a London 

 pride, springing from a comparatively large and 

 richly-stored seed on its own diy prairies. Its 

 leaves, which spread in a rosette, are not unlike 

 those of the house-leek in shape ; they are very 



