ts position it will fall weakly
over and lie along the ground. In its simple way it gains the object
aspired to by all climbers, namely the possession of a satisfactory
position in the world without going to the expense of building a stem
stiff enough to stand alone. To children goose-grass is valuable as the
ideal material for the making of sham birds' nests, since the hooked
prickles hold the stems in position and make the art of nest-building a
singularly easy one.

The great revolution that breaks out in the spring, when the store-houses
of the plant pour nutriment into the numberless awakening buds is a
miracle annually repeated in the endless procession of life. We know
something of the mechanism by which mobilisation is effected. We know
for instance that the starch-grains guarded by the dormant plant during
the idle days of winter are liquified, or rather, that the starch is
converted into sugar, and being soluble in water can flow from the
magazines of the plant to where growth, implying the creation of millions
of newly born cells, demands material. We are gradually learning to
understand something of that seething cauldron of life which we can dimly
watch in living things. The ferment diastase is one of the tools with
which plants perform their miracles of chemical activity. This diastase
and its brother-ferments have qualities resembling those of living
creatures. They may, like seeds, be dried and kept in a bottle until
they are awakened by giving them water. Perhaps this is talking in a
circle, and that ferments only resemble living things because organisms
contain so many of these mysterious bodies. I like to fancy that there
is something more than this, and that a ferment is an automaton which the
plant compels to labour for it--a Frankenstein monster having semi-living
qualities, being no more than a parody of life. But I am getting beyond
the questions that are in tune with a spring day.

V
JANE AUSTEN

The most obvious characteristic of English country life as described by
Jane Austen, is a quietness such as even the elder generation now living
have not experienced. A quietness which many would call dull and some
few peaceful. It is, indeed, hard to believe that life was once so
placid, so stay-at-home, so domestic, so devoid, not merely of
excitement, but of any change whatever.

The life of Emma Woodhouse (to take a single instance) has all the
characteristics of this deep