neapples
then,--though they were only as big as filberts.) But we cannot follow that
farther now; nor consider when a flower is perfect, and when it is not, or
we should get into morals, and I don't know where else; we will go back to
the moss I have gathered, for I begin to see my way, a little, to
understanding it.

{16}

7. The second piece I have on the table is a cluster--an inch or two
deep--of the moss that grows everywhere, and that the birds use for
nest-building, and we for packing, and the like. It is dry, since
yesterday, and its fibres define themselves against the dark ground in warm
green, touched with a glittering light. Note that burnished lustre of the
minute leaves; they are necessarily always relieved against dark hollows,
and this lustre makes them much clearer and brighter than if they were of
dead green. In that lustre--and it is characteristic of them--they differ
wholly from the dead, aloe-like texture of the pineapple leaf; and remind
me, as I look at them closely, a little of some conditions of chaff, as on
heads of wheat after being threshed. I will hunt down that clue presently;
meantime there is something else to be noticed on the old brick.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

8. Out of its emerald green cushions of minute leaves, there rise, here and
there, thin red threads, each with a little brown cap, or something like a
cap, at the top of it. These red threads shooting up out of the green
tufts, are, I believe, the fructification of the moss; fringing its surface
in the woods, and on the rocks, with the small forests of brown stems, each
carrying its pointed cap or crest--of infinitely varied 'mode,' as we shall
see presently; and, which is one of their most blessed functions, carrying
high the dew in the morning; every spear balancing its own crystal globe.

9. And now, with my own broken memories of moss {17} and this unbroken,
though unfinished, gift of the noble labour of other people, the Flora
Danica, I can generalize the idea of the precious little plant, for myself,
and for the reader.

All mosses, I believe, (with such exceptions and collateral groups as we
may afterwards discover, but they are not many,) that is to say, some
thousands of species, are, in their strength of existence, composed of
fibres surrounded by clusters of dry _spinous_ leaves, set close to the
fibre they grow on. Out of this leafy stern descends a fibrous root, and
ascends in its season, a capped seed.

We