CHAPTER VIII 
RUSHES AND SEDGES 
“When as the breezes pass 
The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways.” 
—Lowell. 
THE wind has many fosterlings in the out- 
door world, but the grasses, rushes, and sedges are, 
in a peculiar sense, his own. 
The grasses grow in prairies and open fields. 
The rushes are most abundant on roadsides and 
river-shores, and in bogs and moist meadows, and 
while some sedges live on the low-lying banks of 
brooks and ditches, others are found in marshes, 
on sea-beaches, and on mountain-tops, above the 
tree-line. So the grasses, rushes, and sedges 
generally prefer the breeziest situations which the 
countryside affords. 
The wind is the author of their being, for 
their flowers, for untold generations, have been 
wind-fertilized. 
And the wind has moulded them, for the 
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