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He was always in a fright when we had to say the Catechism in church, and that day, I remember, he shook so that I could hardly stand straight myself, and Bob Furniss, the blacksmith's son, who stood on the other side of him, whispered quite loud, "Eh! see thee, how Master Jem dodders!" for which Jem gave him an eye as black as his father's shop afterwards, for Jem could use his fists if he could not learn by heart.
Like the majority of dodders, this species is an annual, so that, as soon as the cycle of vegetation is accomplished, the plant dies after flowering and fruiting. But here the seeds do not arrive at maturity, and the plant has to be propagated by a peculiar method. In a short time the graft will bud, and in a few months the host plant will be covered with it.
But 'the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns', and now it appears that the immortal soul of us must be evolved, somewhat in the same fashion as protoplasm, and unless we fight for 'survival' elsewhere, we shall not be numbered among the spirited 'fittest', but degenerate into parasites, dodders, backsliders.
In a field of growing flax we can find somewhat oftener than the farmer likes a curious tribe of plants, the dodders. Their stems are thin and wiry, and their small white flowers, globular in shape, make the azure blossoms of the flax all the lovelier by contrast. As their cousins the morning glories are to this day, the dodders in their first estate were true climbers.
The dodders and mistletoes rob juices from the stem and branches of their unfortunate hosts; more numerous still are the unbidden guests that fasten themselves upon the roots of their prey.
So there he dodders; too cowardly to fly in the face of superstition. He must torture and humiliate the Colonel Sahib and his daughter. Ah, these white people! They have heads and hearts of steel. I know." "And Umballa has the heart of a flea-bitten pariah dog. When the time comes he will grovel and squirm and whine." "He will," agreed Ahmed. "His feet are even now itching for the treadmill."
He started and jumped same as our big tom cat when Mouser comes round about him. You'd have died of laughing. Then he comes on for the bank'et, and stamps his foot and tells the ghost to be off; and then he trembles and dodders from head to foot like Mouser when he's had his wash on Saturday nights. You'd have dropt, it was so queer."
The dodders, then, are essentially parasites, and their apparent simplicity gives them a very peculiar aspect. Because of their destructive nature they have likewise been called by the unpoetic name of hellweed; and, for the reason that they embrace their host plants so closely, they have been called love weed and love vine.
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