hey were at first naturally indistinguishable
from ordinary devilgrass and by the time their true character was
determined so rapid was their growth they were already beyond all
possibility of control.

The grass was now everyone's primary thought, replacing the moon (among
lovers), the incometax (among individuals of importance), the weather
(among strangers), and illness (among ladies no longer interested in the
moon), as topics of conversation. Old friends meeting casually after
many years' lapse greeted each other with "What's the latest on the
grass?" Radiocomedians fired gagmen with weeks of service behind them
for failure to provide botanical quips, or, conversely, hired raw
writers who had inhabited the fringes of Hollywood since Mack Sennett
days on the strength of a single agrostological illusion. Newspapers ran
long articles on _Cynodon dactylon_ and the editors of their garden
sections were roused from the somnolence into which they had sunk upon
receiving their appointment and shoved into doubleleaded boldfaced
position.

Textbooks on botany began outselling popular novels and a mere work of
fiction having the accidental title _Greener Than You Think_ was
catapulted onto the bestseller list before anyone realized it wasnt an
academic discussion of the family Gramineae. Contributors to
scientifiction magazines burst bloodvessels happily turning out ten
thousand words a day describing their heroes' adventures amid the red
grass of Mars or the blue grass of Venus after they had
singlehanded--with the help of a deathray and the heroine's pure
love--conquered the green grass of Tellus.

Professors, shy and otherwise, were lured from their classrooms to
lecture before ladies' clubs hitherto sacred to the accents of
transoceanic celebrities and Eleanor Roosevelt. There they competed on
alternate forums with literate gardeners and stuttering horticultural
amateurs. Stolon, rhizome and culm became words replacing crankshaft and
piston in the popular vocabulary; the puerile reports Gootes fabricated
under my name as the man responsible for the phenomenon were syndicated
in newspapers from coast to coast, and a query as to rates was received
from the _Daily Mail_.

Brother Paul's exhortations on the radio increased in both length and
intensity as the grass spread. Pastors of other churches and conductors
of similar programs denounced him as misled; realestate operators,
fearful of all this talk about the grass br