Part 22

"My leaves shall run up, and my root shall run down, While the bud in my bosom is swelling."

Long ago, when I was a child, I saw a field covered with beautiful white things, smooth and rounded like the top of an egg, which seemed to rise here and there from the grass. They grew out of the ground, but yet they did not look like any flowers I had ever seen. I was told that the pretty white things were mushrooms, and that I might gather as many as I could in my pinafore, and take them home for breakfast.

You may fancy how delightful it was to search about in the dewy grass, every minute finding a mushroom finer and whiter than the rest; but what puzzled me was the wonder of it--how had they all come there?

They had grown up in the night, I was told, while I had been asleep in my bed; and I knew it must be so, for I had been in that field only the evening before, and had seen nothing there but the sheep, eating the grass and daisies.

The thought of these beautiful white things growing up so quietly in the night-time, when no one could see them, was very wonderful to me, and I only wished that I might stay up all the next night in that field, and see them come, and find out how they grew: I was sure I could keep awake all night!

But since then I have learnt that there are many, many things about which we grown people, as well as you children, may ask questions, and say, "How do they come?" and there is no answer ready for us except that old wise answer--God has made them to be.

I daresay you may have a little garden of your own. Did you ever, in spring-time, make a hole in the soft brown earth, and drop into it a little black round seed? Perhaps last March you put in a good many sweet peas, and then covered each one up in its earthy bed, and left them. People told you not to forget to take care of your garden, and so you often watered the place where the seeds lay hidden, and at last you saw something very tiny, but fresh and green and full of life, where only the dark brown earth had been the day before. You clapped your hands for pleasure, and ran to tell everybody: "My sweet peas are coming up!" You see you can tell when the seeds are growing, but you cannot tell how they grow; you can water the ground where they are lying hidden from your sight, but when you have done all you know how to do, you must still leave them to God's care; for He alone can make those little dark balls spring up and grow, and blossom in sweetness and beauty.

What wonderful thing it was that went on underground so quietly, while you were asleep or at play, neither you nor I can tell; and this dead-like seed coming to life and springing up into beauty is only one of the many things which go on in this world all around us, seen and known only by God, who says of the seed of His word, sown by His servants--not in the ground, but in the hearts of people--that it is He who "giveth the increase."

We speak of vegetable life as well as of animal life, for I am sure you have not forgotten that plants breathe through their leaves--they drink in water by their roots, and some plants even show that they are sensitive to touch by shrinking if anything comes in contact with them; but how a daisy, with its hardy little stem and its fresh green leaves and "crimson-tipped" flower, comes to grow out of the earth, we do not know at all.

The beautiful leaves, fringed with downy hairs, are the lungs of the plants; and just as the blood runs through the veins at the back of your hand, the sap: which is the life-blood of the plant, runs through some fine veins which you see at the back of the leaf. If this sap were to cease flowing up the stem, the leaves and flowers would soon droop and die.

Look at the sheep, cropping the grass so busily that they hardly lift their heads from the ground. Every time they breathe, they give out air which feeds all the green things around them; and as the green things breathe this air, by the very act they purify it, and give it back to the sheep, fit for them to inhale again.

We see that when God made the world, everything was prepared beforehand. He did not cause the earth to bring forth living things, until all that was needful to keep them alive was ready. Before the beasts of the field were made, the grass, which was to be their food, covered the earth like a soft carpet, and their table was furnished. This is a lesson which we have already learnt, when speaking of "The Ocean of Air"--but it is one of which we cannot be too often reminded.

And now I want to point out to you that in the eleventh verse we read of three kinds of living things which God caused the earth to bring forth. Let us look at them: (1) "grass"; (2) "the herb yielding seed"; (3) "the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed was in itself."

Long ago, when I first noticed these three distinct kinds, I could not understand why there was a difference made between "grass" and "the herb yielding seed"; for the grass in our fields in autumn is, as little May said, "all full of pips." This was her way of describing those beautiful seeds which hang so gracefully that we sometimes gather the long stalks and dry them for their beauty, that we may have a winter nosegay when there are no flowers to be found. I had forgotten my puzzle about this when, not long ago, I met with a very interesting book which explained that the grass which is spoken of in Genesis as the first thing which the earth brought forth, was not the grass of our fields. If you look in the margin of your Bible, you will see that it is there called "tender grass." You might perhaps think there is not much difference; but words, which are the names of things, are very strong for good or evil. And especially in reading the Bible, it is important to get the very best English word that can be found for the Hebrew words which we could not understand. The verse has been more exactly turned from Hebrew into English in this way: "And God said. Let the earth sprout forth with tender grass."

This word "tender grass" is not the same as that which is used in a Psalm which the children were just then learning, where we read that God "causeth the grass to grow for the cattle." It means rather "the plant that shoots" out of the ground, and would apply to any green thing just sprouting. It is thought that in the word are included all those plants such as mosses and mushrooms, whose flowers are invisible, and which multiply not by producing seed, but by budding, or by means of little living particles, looking like brown dust, which botanists call "spores."

These flowerless plants are of much simpler structure than those which have root, stem, leaf and flower, and produce plants of their own kind by means of their seeds. If you look at the back of a common fern, you will see brown specks, not bigger than silkworms' eggs, beautifully arranged upon it. Each of these is a collection of little cases containing spores, which by-and-by will split open, allowing the spores to fall into the ground.

"Then the spores are the same as seeds, after all"--you say. No; if they were seeds, each would at once grow into a fern. This is what happens, as far as I can explain it to you: from the spore springs a tiny leaf, which roots itself, and it is from this green leaf that the young fern actually grows, until it, as it were, begins life on its own account. The leaf dies down, and the first frond of the new fern peeps above ground, closely coiled up, as you have often seen, if you have been through the woods in spring-time. The earliest forms of vegetable life, then, brought forth by the earth at the word of God were the plants which have no seeds: botanists have divided such plants into groups--the seaweeds and lichens, the mosses, and the ferns.

Of the seaweeds, the lowest of all groups of plants, we were speaking some time ago. The lichens, though such lowly plants, are very interesting, for I have read that every form of lichen is composed of two distinct plants--a seaweed and a fungus--so closely interwoven that you cannot tell where the one ends and the other begins. The lichens range in colour from white to yellow, red, green, brown--and some are as black as that rare black pansy of which I told you. Each kind has its own peculiar way of growing, and these hardy little plants can live where no other plant can--on the hard black lava, on naked rocks, and even upon the highest snow-mountain.

Next time you pass an old gateway or ruined wall, and notice stains of yellow and brown and grey upon it, remember that there the lichens grow; tiny plants indeed, whose beauties are revealed only by the microscope, but each one of them made by God, and given the means of living by Him, just as much as those giants of the forest of which travellers tell us such wonderful tales. You may sometimes find a rock, or the trunk of a tree, encrusted with dry lichen, and it is interesting to know that these plants when they decay form the first mould for mosses and ferns, plants which botanists think of as higher in the scale of vegetable life than the lowly lichens themselves are.

The great family of mosses is found not only near home, but even far away amid the icefields and the snow, where the reindeer searches with its horns for the white moss which is its food, and where Sir John Franklin and his devoted men gathered the black Tripe de Roche upon which they tried to live during those dark months when their ship lay fast wedged between

"... those icebergs vast, With heads all crowned with snow, Whose green roots sleep in the awful deep, Two hundred fathoms low."

But prettier than these Arctic mosses are those nearer home. Talking about them makes me think of a place where I wish you and I could go together some beautiful afternoon in winter. It is a lovely little pine-wood near Bournemouth, to which some boys, with whose friends I was staying during the Christmas holidays, wished to take me to see their favourite walk.

Once when we were starting for our run, on a bright frosty morning, and I was rather hoping I should be taken to the sea, I heard them say to each other, "The Pincushion Wood; that's it; do let us go there." I wondered what kind of place this could be but when we had scrambled through some heather and come to this pine-wood, I saw at once why they had given it its name. Overhead, with their needles against the blue sky, were the pines in their dark solemn green, but under our feet the ground was bright with moss which grew, not on stones or trunks of trees, but all by itself in round balls, soft and firm and cushiony. You may be sure I was delighted with the green pincushions: we gathered a quantity of them, and I took one home with me, but though I watered it carefully, it soon lost its beauty.

These moss-balls lay at the roots of the pines, and we could pick up as many as we pleased; but generally even the most delicate mosses grasp the soil, and clasp their soft tendrils round the stones so firmly that you need a knife or a sharp stone to make them loose their hold. One of the uses of moss is to protect the rocks from the frost, and from the heavy rains which wash them away by degrees. The roots of trees, too, are cherished and warmed by the closely clinging mosses; and by holding the moisture from dew and rain, they form where they grow a little bed of soft mould, and so prepare the way for plants of larger growth.

Do you know the Trumpet-moss, with its red cups each holding its own little dewdrop? Perhaps not, for it is a rare treasure, and needs to be sought for in its own haunts; but there are many green mosses which are very beautiful, and so common that we see them upon every garden wall. There is the Hair-moss, the seeds of which are eaten by the birds, while its delicate tendrils serve as soft lining for their nests: it grows plentifully beside our streams; but far away in Lapland, during the short summer when the flowers all at once burst into bloom, it may be seen in full beauty. The Laps cut this moss in layers and dry it in the sun, to form a soft rug for them to sleep under during their cold nights. Then there is the velvety moss which, like the many-coloured lichen, loves to creep over old buildings, and make the ruined and desolate places bright with a beauty not their own.

Speaking of mosses reminds me of a story which is told us by a doctor named Mungo Park, who was nearly lost in an African desert about a hundred years ago. Day after day he had toiled on, under the burning sun, until he was almost in despair; for he had been robbed and deserted, and felt as if there was nothing left for him but to lie down and die in the wilderness, or become a prey to the savage animals which ranged over the country; and the remembrance of those at home in Scotland who would never know what had become of him, made him sick at heart. As these sad thoughts filled the traveller's mind and took away all his courage, his tired eye lighted upon a tiny tuft of moss, showing green and fair even in the parched soil of the desert. It was the Lesser Fork-moss which grows in our shady woods, and beside our ponds and ditches. We should perhaps hardly notice it unless we were shown its beauty by a microscope, for it is one of the smallest and humblest of things that grow; but as he looked at it, tears of joy came to his eyes. Silently springing up in that thirsty land, the tiny moss spoke to the lonely exile of the care of God for the very smallest of His creatures, whether the restless brown bird of which the Lord Jesus spoke when He bade His disciples not to fear, saying, "Ye are of more value than many sparrows," or the creeping moss which spreads from stone to stone.

In a moment all was changed for the weary traveller. He felt that he was not alone in that great solitude, for God who had cared for that tuft of moss, and kept it green and fresh by means of some hidden spring, surely cared for him, His own child, and would show him the right way out of that desolate place. Thus the burden and the heat were forgotten in happy thoughts of the faithfulness of God; and he went on his way with new courage, and soon found the path which he had lost; but he never forgot the message which the little moss had brought him. Though the whole plant was not larger than the tip of his finger, he managed to keep it safely through all his journeys by land and sea, and had the pleasure of seeing it flourish under our cold skies just as well as it had done beneath the burning sun of Africa. If you are fond of poetry, you may like to read some lines written by the poet McCheyne about this incident.

"Sad, faint, and weary, on the sand Our traveller sat him down; his hand Covered his burning head; Above, beneath, behind, around, No resting for the eye he found-- All nature seemed as dead.