and looking almost like a vase of alabaster. In the south of Africa, this lovely flower grows wild, and every ditch and water-course is filled with it. Unlike most of the tribe, it gives an agreeable perfume; and its leaves, of a fine yellowish green, contrast as well with the foliage of other plants, as its delicate spathe does with the gayer tints of their flowers. A species of this plant, growing in Lapland, is very useful to the inhabitants. Sometimes their crops fail them, in consequence of the severe frost, and they are obliged to eat a coarse bread made from the bark of a tree. To provide against such a season of hardship, they gather the roots of the water dragon* in the early spring, before the leaves come forth. They first wash them carefully, taking away the fibrous part, and then dry them in an oven. They afterwards bruise and chop them in a hollow vessel or tub, made of firwood, until they become as small as oatmeal, and acquire a sweet pleasant smell. The next process is to grind them, and when this is done, the meal is slowly boiled in water, and kept constantly stirred until it becomes as thick as flummery. It is left standing in the pot for two * Calla palustris. or three days and nights; indeed, the longer the better, for if used immediately, it is bitter and acrid, both which qualities go off by keeping. In order to make bread, it is generally mixed with flour or meal, made of the bark of the fir; for the water dragon is Cat's Tail. * very scarce in some places, and not to be had in sufficient quantities to use alone. In other places, however, it is abundant, and cart-loads of it are collected at a time. Happy is the peasant who has a store of it, and can be quite sure of a plentiful supply of what he calls "missen bread." The great cat's tail, or reed-mace, that grows *Typha latifolia. in all marshy places, is of the same family as the arum. In England it is not used as food, but among the Cossacks it is a favourite article of diet, and they devour it with as much eagerness as if it were a religious duty. A traveller in Russia says, it was to be seen in all the streets and houses as he went along, tied up in bundles, as we tie up asparagus, and these bundles were hawked about, or sold in the shops. The Cossacks peel off the outer rind, and find near the root a tender white part of the stem, about eighteen inches long. It affords a crisp, cool, and very pleasant article of food, and it soon became as great a favourite with the English traveller as with the Cossacks. The reed-mace is found all over the world; in ponds, ditches, and marshy places, and by the side of brooks and rivers. It flourishes alike in the northern regions of Sweden, and beneath the fervid sun of the tropics; but the Cossacks declare it is only fit for food when it grows in the shallows and marshes of the Don. "Is this a time to be cloudy and sad, "There's a dance of leaves in the aspen bower, There's a titter of winds in the beechen tree; There's a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower, And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea." Chapter the Twenty-eighth. THE WATER PLANTS.* SOME of the water plants are very like seaweeds in appearance, and none more so than the grass-wrack,† which grows in the sea, and in creeks of salt water that run up into the shore. Its leaves resemble long strips of narrow ribbon, and on that account it bears the name zostera, which comes from a Greek word meaning ribbon. The flowers are of the very simplest description, and consist of two little green anthers and a pistil, without either calyx or corolla. In the sea the grass wrack performs a very important office; for with its long firm roots, it lays the first foundation of what will afterwards become a salt mash, and so acts beneath the water, a little in the same way as the |