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As the movement of the scythe swept the guillotined grass backward, the trailing stolons entangled themselves with the uncut stand, pulling the sheaves out of place and making the stacks ragged and inadequate looking. Behind me a cocky voice asked, "What's cooking around here, chum?" I turned round to a young man, thin as a bamboo pole, elegantly tailored, who yawned to advertise gold inlays.

This tribe, which takes its name from the Celtic rub, which signifies red, and is supposed to be so named from the red tint of its young shoots, as well as from the colour of the juice of its berry, consists chiefly of shrub-like plants, with perennial roots, most of which produce suckers or stolons from the roots, which ripen and drop their leaves one year, and resume their foliage, produce blossom shoots, flowers, and fruit, and die the next year, of which the raspberry and common bramble are examples.

Why it surged up to the Rockies and not over them when it had conquered individually higher mountains was not understood, but people were quick once more to take hope and remember the plant's normal distaste for cold or think there was perhaps something in the rarefied atmosphere to paralyze the seeds or inhibit the stolons, so preventing further progress.

The salt seemed no more to them than bare ground, concrete, vegetation, or any of the hundred obstacles they had traveled. Unstutteringly the vinelike stolons went forward. A foot, two, six, ten. No recoil, no hesitation, no recognition they were traversing a wall erected against them.

The English Ivy, as we have seen, is also climbing, by means of its aërial roots. The Red Clover is ascending, the branches rising obliquely from the base. Some kinds of Clover, as the White Clover, are creeping, that is, with prostrate branches rooting at the nodes and forming new plants. Such rooting branches are called stolons, or when the stem runs underground, suckers.

That is, the stems are short and jointed. Those aboveground, the true stems, are called stolons, and those below, from which the roots spread, are rhizomes. Conceive if you will twoinch lengths of stiff wire and this plant is vulgarly called wiregrass in some regions just as it is called devilgrass here bent on either end at rightangles.

The overrun crack was duplicated by an untouched one a few inches away it too went; the fine tentacles on top of the mound reached upward, shimmering like the air on a hot summer's day, and near my feet hundreds of runners crept ever closer, the pale stolons shiny and brittle, supporting the ominously bristling green leaves.

Slafe had unpacked another camera and attached various gadgets to it, pursing his lips and running his hands lovingly over the assembled product before thrusting it downward into the stolons where queer shocks of radiance seemed to indicate he was taking flashlight pictures of the subsurface.

Besides that of the excavator, the Necrophorus certainly possesses another art: the art of breaking the cables, the roots, the stolons, the slender rhizomes which check the body's descent into the grave. To the work of the shovel and the pick must be added that of the shears. All this is perfectly logical and may be foreseen with complete lucidity.

Disregarding her rudeness in not inviting me, I accompanied her unasked to her laboratory-cabin. She laid the stolons on an enamelsurfaced table and busied herself with some apparatus. I could not take my eyes from these segments of the Grass. They lay on the table, not specimens of vegetation, but stunned creatures ready to spring to vigorous and vengeful life when they recovered.