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He took them up to his garret, where row after row of dried plants hung, heavy with seed-pods, and with the most careful precautions to avoid touching them himself, or having Hannah do so, he directed Ann Mary to fill a two-quart basin with the seed. "That will plant a piece of ground about six paces square," he said. "That will raise enough seed for you."
The alkali growth is monotonous here; but there was a world of beauty and caprice in the forms of the seed-pods dried upon their stalks. Most of these pretty little purses were empty. Their treasure went, like the savings of a maiden aunt, when the idle wind got hold of it.
It then flew out again, and the same process was repeated again and again. Always, when in circling round it came in sight of the seed-pods, down it pounced, alighted near them, and recommenced its quest on foot.
There are plants called cockle-burs whose seed-pods are provided with stickers in every direction, so that anything brushing against them is sure to pick them up. At the end of each sticker is a very tiny hook, and these hooks fasten themselves tightly into anything that brushes against it, animal wool, hair, or clothing, etc.
I could buy curiosities from those regions that were ever so much better than any that I had collected; but I could not buy shells that I myself had gathered, nor great seed-pods, like bean-pods two feet long, which I had picked from the trees, nor pieces of rock that I myself had brought up from a coral-reef.
All about that centre the dead fibres and seeds were magnified and distorted by the curvature of the glass. But we could see enough! One after another all down the sunlit slope these miraculous little brown bodies burst and gaped apart, like seed-pods, like the husks of fruits; opened eager mouths. that drank in the heat and light pouring in a cascade from the newly-risen sun.
"That is a droll name, nurse," said Lady Mary. "Does it prick one's finger like a thistle?" "No, my lady; but when the seed-pods are nearly ripe, if you touch them, they spring open and curl into little rings, and the seed drops out." "Nurse, when you see any of these curious flowers, will you show them to me?" Mrs.
It made her nervous at last, and she went out on the lawn to get rid of the sensation. She picked a few flowers, pulled the seed-pods from one of the geraniums under her care, and spent some minutes in petting and fondling Marian's pretty colly, who lay stretched out luxuriously in the full rays of the mild September sunshine.
I remember the wild plantains, with huge leaves split into slips, and their red seed-pods hanging down at the end of twisted ropes; the tall palms, with their feathery tops; the monster aloes, with their long flashy thorny leaves; and the ferns as large as trees, and yet as beautifully cut as those in our own country, which clothed every hillside where a fountain flowed forth; and then the countless variety of creepers, whose beautiful tracery crowned every rock, and hung down in graceful festoons from the lofty trees.
Falchion, when I heard a voice that was new to me, singing a song I had known years before, when life was ardent, and love first came halcyon days in country lanes, in lilac thickets, of pleasant Hertfordshire, where our footsteps met a small bombardment of bursting seed-pods of the furze, along the green common that sloped to the village. I thought of all this, and of HER everlasting quiet.
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