35 



clusters. The very flowers and fruits, like the rest of the plant, 

 take space in which to be individual and airy. All about it are the 

 signs of a leisurely, rank looseness and steady aggression. It 

 is a gross feeder, only attaining its peculiar protection in the rich- 

 est spots, and I wonder what it would do if it had all the food it 

 could use. Visions arise akin to that of Jack's bean-stalk ex- 

 periences. 



It is a watery and plethoric herb from its youth up, and when 

 autumn comes, blushes like a very wine bibber, and 

 being so watery, how quickly and utterly is its ruin under the 

 frost. The mullien is an old Puritan squatter sedant on his bar- 

 ren hill, where he must wrestle his sustenance from the soil, whose 

 constitution is of the rocks, geologic. But this poke-weed is the 

 son of luxury, liveth in rich places and waxeth fat, but how quick 

 is his decline and fall ! Long ere winter has taken matters in 

 hand it is bent and broken upon the earth as if it had been made of 

 pasteboard — the very emblem of fast rising, transient success 

 and complete irretrievable ruin. In his pride he was the very 

 dandy of the woods; how grandly he bore those bloom-clusters, 

 green fruits and ripe, on stem ends not hanging down as of pure 

 indolence, but still languidly half-hanging, showing even then 

 his internal debility. Behold how he lies, his stalks carmine no 

 more, but bleached like yellow bones, broken like pipe stems — the 

 largest and most ignoble vegetable wreck to be seen in all the 

 woods. 



OUR SOUTHERN CANES. 



In the Southern States the bamboo tribe of grasses is rep- 

 resented by two tall species known as canes. These grow along 

 streams and in other low grounds and form dense thickets known 

 as canebrakes. In many of their habits they closely resemble the 

 true bamboos, as will be seen from the following account taken 

 from Dr. Mohr's "Plant Life of Alabama :" 



"These two species, which resemble each other so closely in 

 habit, differ greatly in their modes of reproduction, a subject of 



