nd The Teacups.

What a strange underground life is that which is led by the organisms we
call trees! These great fluttering masses of leaves, stems, boughs,
trunks, are not the real trees. They live underground, and what we see
are nothing more nor less than their tails.

The Mistress dropped her teaspoon. Number Five looked at the Doctor,
whose face was very still and sober. The two Annexes giggled, or came
very near it.

Yes, a tree is an underground creature, with its tail in the air. All its
intelligence is in its roots. All the senses it has are in its roots.
Think what sagacity it shows in its search after food and drink! Somehow
or other, the rootlets, which are its tentacles, find out that there is a
brook at a moderate distance from the trunk of the tree, and they make
for it with all their might. They find every crack in the rocks where
there are a few grains of the nourishing substance they care for, and
insinuate themselves into its deepest recesses. When spring and summer
come, they let their tails grow, and delight in whisking them about in
the wind, or letting them be whisked about by it; for these tails are
poor passive things, with very little will of their own, and bend in
whatever direction the wind chooses to make them. The leaves make a deal
of noise whispering. I have sometimes thought I could understand them,
as they talk with each other, and that they seemed to think they made the
wind as they wagged forward and back. Remember what I say. The next
time you see a tree waving in the wind, recollect that it is the tail of
a great underground, many-armed, polypus-like creature, which is as proud
of its caudal appendage, especially in summer-time, as a peacock of his
gorgeous expanse of plumage.

Do you think there is anything so very odd about this idea? Once get it
well into your heads, and you will find it renders the landscape
wonderfully interesting. There are as many kinds of tree-tails as there
are of tails to dogs and other quadrupeds. Study them as Daddy Gilpin
studied them in his "Forest Scenery," but don't forget that they are only
the appendage of the underground vegetable polypus, the true organism to
which they belong.

He paused at this point, and we all drew long breaths, wondering what was
coming next. There was no denying it, the "cracked Teacup" was clinking
a little false,--so it seemed to the company. Yet, after all, the fancy
was not delirious,--the mind could follow it wel