A Window in Arcady 
Most curious of our water plants, perhaps, is the eel- 
grass, which grows in quiet waters throughout the eastern 
United States and may be gathered now along our rivers. 
On the Chesapeake it is called wild celery, and is said to 
give the characteristic flavor to the canvasback duck, which 
loves to feed on it. It grows in bunches in the mud of the 
bottom close to shore, and its ribbon-like leaves, sometimes 
six feet in length, float on the stream. The oddity of the 
plant is in its mode of flowering. The flowers are of two 
sexes, of which the females or seed bearers rest upon the 
water and are connected with the root of the plant by a 
long, slender stem. The males, on the contrary, have very 
short stems and are hidden far under water. As the male 
buds mature their stems snap in two and allow the flowers 
to rise to the surface. These decapitated blooms then shed 
their pollen about the expanded seed-bearing blossoms, 
which are thus fertilized, whereupon the long stems coil 
themselves spirally and draw the precious seed-vessels under 
water down into the mud to ripen. This operation is so 
nearly akin to the exercise of real intelligence that it is 
worth one’s while, if he have an opportunity, to watch it. 
August 15.—Stopping recently at a wayside farm, I 
had my attention attracted by the sight of a colony of white 
flowers blooming neither quite in the garden nor quite in 
the field, but in a sort of no-man’s-land between, and 
I was told they were musk roses. On inspection they 
proved to be not roses, but musk-mallows, grown restive 
and inclined to wander out into the wide world. That 
these old garden mallows should be known here as roses 
is an interesting instance of the persistence in rural neigh- 
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