few green isles appear — peat-moss, broom-moss, 

 hair-cap and fern-moss. Like miniature smilax 

 are the mniums, marvelous little trailing beauties, 

 while of all vegetable elves the silvery bryum has 

 the greatest witchery, with young drooping pea- 

 green capsules like so many fairy pipes. A minia- 

 ture jungle is the fern-moss, a forest of tree ferns 

 at our very doors — Ceylon and Java in our wood 

 lot. It is only a difference of dimension. A patch 

 of this is as rich and luxuriant as any jungle of 

 bamboos on the lower slope of the Himalaya, and 

 a spider might as easily lose himself in one as a 

 man in the other. 



With what a fine garment of green does Nature 

 clothe the trunks of swamp-maples and some 

 black birches. It is a true woodland costume be- 

 fitting their sylvan life; a snug garment tightly 

 wrapped about the trunk as though to protedt the 

 vital parts of the body while the extremities are 

 bared to the winds. Woven in woodland looms 

 of mosses and lichens, it forever replenishes itself, 

 the holes mended and the bare spots renewed as 

 by deft and invisible weavers. 



Where do the birds go in August? Never an 

 oriole's note nor a bluebird's warble. All the 



117. 



