TRAVELLERS JOY. 235 



The young branches are of a purple colour, 

 and the leaves, which consist of two pairs of 

 leaflets with an odd one, are of a yellow 

 green. The flowers, which appear in July, 

 are in axillary racemens, conjugate, leafy, 

 dividing first into three, then into two smaller 

 branches. The flowers are small, and have 

 four petals, which are a little rolled back, of 

 a greenish white, and they are slightly per- 

 fumed. But the principal beauty of this 

 shrub consists in the singular manner by 

 which the seed is covered by a downy sub- 

 stance 5 and the long plumose tail which is 

 attached to each of these little seeds, which, 

 being in clusters of about twenty, give the 

 appearance of so many bunches of feathers ; 

 and the bushes are often seen from October 

 to Christmas completely clad in these vege- 

 table feathery tufts, which seem intended to 

 convey them from hill to hill, where they 

 are hunted by various birds for the sake of 

 the seed, with as much avidity as the hawk 

 hunts the lark. The shepherds often cut the 

 old wood of this vine, which they light at 

 one end, and smoke instead of a pipe of to- 

 bacco. 



