310 NATURAL HISTORY OP THE FARM 



Where burrowing crawfishes abound, their holes will be 

 found — some of them capped over with mud chimneys since 

 the drought began. We can test the depth to which the 

 water-level in the soil has descended by probing the craw- 

 fish holes with a stick. 



Where we lose the channel of the brook, 

 as we pass out into a small grassy flood-plain, 

 we find that though there is no water in sight, 

 there is moisture in the soil. Such soil-gather- 

 ing things as the fowl-meadow-grass (fig. 135) 

 are making the most of the situation; they are 

 covering the plain with a tangle of stems that 

 will strain out of subsequent floods their burden 

 of silt and trash. Thus will the plain be built 

 a little higher; another layer will be added to 

 form rich moisture-holding soil. 



By the side of the brook gone dry, nature 



sets us examples in the conservation of 



moisture. There we may find plants burned 



to death with the drouth; others of the same 



species wilted sadly, but still alive; and others, 



green and flourishing. The differences are 



mainly due to the disposition of the soil about 



Fl itig 13 panide U of their roots; soil hard and bare in the first case, 



ow-Jr°a!l mead " and well adapted to facilitate loss of water; 



and loose soil well covered from the sun in 



the last case, and full of reserve moisture. 



Somewhere, along our brook, we may come upon a reedy 

 swale now dry enough to walk across, but never dry enough 

 for -field-crops, and therefore left unmolested by the plow. 

 It is apt to be filled with sedges and marsh ferns, with a 

 few cat-tails in the wettest spots, and to have round about, 

 a fringe of moisture-loving composites such as boneset, joe- 

 pye weed, swamp-milkweed, goldenrod and New England 



