Arrowhead, Squaw's Toes, and Other Things 127 



good light. In the early days, when there were lots of Re- 

 publicans, they used to cany them in torchlight parades." 



"That probably didn't exhaust the whole marsh capacity. 

 Anything else?" 



"We put up marsh hay. It was pretty good feed." 



"Is that all?" 



"We gathered wild rice. It was tops in duck and goose 

 dressing. I can't think of any other uses." 



It was a start, but only a start. Marshes had existed through 

 the centuries. The ancient civilizations must have looked to 

 them for many tilings. On the way home I remembered the 

 biblical story of the daughter of Levi who, when she could 

 no longer conceal the infant Moses from the Egyptians, put 

 him in an ark of bulrushes which she laid by the riverside. 

 Pharaoh's daughter rescued the weeping child and turned it 

 over to a Hebrew nurse to raise. I wondered just how an ark 

 could be made from our stiff and unworkable round bul- 

 rushes, but when I consulted a Bible concordance I learned 

 that the plants referred to were of the papyrus species, with 

 triangular stems. I found a translation of a work on plants by 

 Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher who died about 287 B.C. 

 There I read that the papyrus had many applications other 

 than for a cradle to house an infant Moses. It was used for 

 boats and their sails, for mats, covers, and clothing, for ropes, 

 and for many other things of which paper probably was the 

 most important. Theophrastus wrote of a lotus, the Nile 

 water lily. When the sun set the lily closed, as does the water 

 lily in our marsh, but our lily lacks the remarkable habits 

 attributed by Theophrastus to the blossom of the Euphrates 

 species which, when it shut up, would go under water till 

 midnight, sinking to a considerable depth so that it was 

 below reach of a man's arm. Then it rose with the dawn and 

 opened as it appeared above the surface of the water. The 

 people collected and pounded the seeds and made loaves 

 of them for food. The lake of Orchomenos grows a kind of 



