342 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 
sides of these leaves are often thickly clothed with 
long, cobwebby hairs, nets to snare the little clam- 
berer and hold her. 
A persevering insect which labors to the top of 
the stem past the deterrent leaves finds herself 
before an armed body-guard which surrounds the 
flowers, a close frill of small leaves, often with 
recurving margins and thickly set with thorns. 
And in some kinds of thistle a crawler which has 
worried through all these obstacles meets and suc- 
‘“ cumbs to a still greater difficulty at last. The 
many flowers which compose the thistle-head grow 
all together in a deep-green cup. This cup is 
made up of overlapping scales, and around it, in 
many varieties of thistle, more cobweb is wound. 
In the common swamp- and pasture-thistles (Fig. 
96) each scale of the cup has in its centre a whitish 
streak, which is very glutinous. Here the luckless 
crawler comes utterly and finally to grief, after all 
her struggles and in full view of her goal. She is 
held fast on the gummy streaks, and her frantic 
struggles to free herself only result in bogging her 
more hopelessly. The gum after a while stops up 
the little holes in her sides through which she 
breathes, and she is thus smothered to death. 
Her fate is not only tragic but perplexing—for 
