c 
RAMBLES IX SEARCH OF FERNS. 
the beauty that surrounded me ; and then I hastened to perform my 
toilet, that I might go forth and taste the freshness of the morning. 
As I sat at breakfast with my cousin and his daughter, Esther, I 
mentioned my immature plan, in which the merry girl expressed great 
interest. 
“ Take up the study of ferns,” she said ; “ I want to do so. I have 
got a book about them, and I want to understand them from the 
beginning. But I can’t bear to study alone ; I don’t like the hard 
part of the work, and my sister, Marian, who generally helps me in 
everything, has been away ever since I got the book. There are 
numbers of ferns in our woods and pastures, and it is a perfect waste 
of objects of interest to neglect them. I have begun to make a fernery, 
but I know nothing about the plants I have put in it, except that 
they are pretty.” 
“ I agree to your plan,” I replied ; “ get your book, and we will 
hie away to the woods.” 
Seated upon a mossy bank, under the shade of oak and birch trees, 
with a merry brook babbling at our feet, we opened our book to con 
our first lesson. Esther had a keenly observant eye, and a mind ever 
on the alert, though, as her own remarks had revealed, she could not 
bear close application. 
“ I will bathe Diver in the rivulet, while you make out the 
meaning of that book,” she said, “and then you shall tell me all 
about it.” 
Diver took very kindly to the bathing, and neither he nor his 
mistress made any haste to return to me. When she did come her 
face was glowing and her eyes sparkling, and she carried a quantity of 
ferns in her hand. 
“ Now tell me all about these ferns,” she said, with a mischievous 
look ; “ you have had full time to master the whole theory.” 
“ I have mastered but little yet,” I replied ; “ but listen to what I 
have learned : — Every fern has a root, which we can easily recognise, 
being subject only to the variations which we observe in the roots of 
other plants. It has a rhizoma , which, in the tree-ferns, is the bole, 
