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Updated: June 18, 2025
"Catkin dear," says the little girl, "I do want to get out of this, for Baba Yaga is going to eat me with her iron teeth." "Well," says the cat, "I will help you." Just then Baba Yaga came to the window. "Are you weaving, little niece?" she asked. "Are you weaving, my pretty?" "I am weaving, auntie," says the little girl, working away, while the loom went clickety clack, clickety clack.
Mayhap in that strange district you come from you keep count of these things, but what have we to do with either when their initial duty is done. Look at that painted butterfly swinging on the honey-laden catkin there. What knows she of the mother who shed her life into a flowercup and forgot which flower it was the minute afterwards. We, too, are insects, stranger."
Then it was, that Nesta recalled her anticipation of his possible design; forgotten by her during their talk of her dear people: Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, and the Yatts, and Simeon Fenellan, Peridon and Catkin, and Skepsey likewise; and the very latest news of her mother. She wished she could have run before him, to spare him. He would not notice a sign. Girls must wait and hear.
When that hour was come my friend tiptoed again to my cheek, and then, pointing to the palace and laughingly hoping fate would send me a bride "as soft as catkin and as sweet as honey," slipped away into the darkness.
The scales which form the female catkin are of a whitish green; the bractea on the back is slightly reddish on its upper side; and the stigma, which has two points, is of a bright red. After fertilization, the scales augment in thickness; and, becoming firmly pressed against each other, they form by their aggregation a fruit, which is three years before it ripens.
I have seen good ones made of peanuts, with the features inked on, and a very young black birch catkin for tail. Beautiful birds also can be made by using a pith body and bright feathers or silks glued on for plumes. The pith itself is easily coloured with water colours.
On the Scotch fir the young green cones are formed about the beginning of June, and then the catkin adjacent to the cone is completely covered with quantities of pale yellow farina. If handled, it covers the fingers as though they had been dipped in sulphur-flour; shake the branch and it flies off, a little cloud of powdery particles.
A few days later the green hylas began to pipe in the swamps, the bullfrogs drummed among the pools in the bottom, the doves cooed in the thickets, and the breath of spring was in the nostrils of all creation, for the wind was heavy with the pungent odor of catkin pollen. The spring flowers were two inches high. The peonies and rhubarb were pushing bright yellow and red cones through the earth.
During the first year it is scarcely larger than the female catkin; and during the second year it becomes globular, and about the size of a walnut. The third year the cones increase rapidly in size; the scales lose their reddish tinge, and become of a beautiful green, the point alone remaining red; and at last, about the end of the third year, they attain maturity.
Geoffrey Langford took off his hat, so as to let the moist spring breeze play round his temples and in the thin locks where the silvery threads had lately grown more perceptible, and gazed upon the dewy grass, the tiny woodbine leaf, the silver "pussycats" on the withy, and the tasselled catkin of the hazel, with the eyes of a man to whom such sights were a refreshment a sort of holiday after the many springs spent in close courts of law and London smoke; and now after his long attendance in a warm dark sick-room.
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