aptures algae in colonies and makes
them work for him. He is, however, a slave-driver of an intelligent
sort; his captives thrive under his mastery, and increase more rapidly
for the healthy exercise he insists that they shall take.

It is an afternoon in August and the sultry air compels us to take
shelter in a grove of swaying maples. Beneath their shade every square
yard of ground bears a score of infant trees, very few of them as much
as a foot in stature. How vain their expectation of one day enjoying an
ample spread of branch and root, of rising to the free sunshine of upper
air! The scene, with its quivering rounds of sunlight, seems peace
itself, but the seeming is only a mask for war as unrelenting as that
of weaponed armies. For every ray of the sunbeam, for every atom of
food, for every inch of standing room, there is deadly rivalry. To begin
the fight is vastly easier than to maintain it, and not one in a hundred
of these bantlings will ever know maturity. We have only to do what
Darwin did--count the plants that throng a foot of sod in spring, count
them again in summer, and at the summer's end, to find how great the
inexorable carnage in this unseen combat, how few its survivors. So hard
here is the fight for a foothold, for daily bread, that the playfulness
inborn in every healthy plant can peep out but timidly and seldom. But
when strife is exchanged for peace, when a plant is once safely
sheltered behind a garden fence, then the struggles of the battlefield
give place to the diversions of the garrison--diversions not
infrequently hilarious enough. Now food abounds and superabounds;
henceforth neither drought nor deluge can work their evil will; insect
foes, as well as may be, are kept at bay; there is room in plenty
instead of dismal overcrowding. The grateful plant repays the care
bestowed upon it by bursting into a sportiveness unsuspected, and indeed
impossible, amidst the alarms and frays incessant in the wilderness. It
departs from parental habits in most astonishing fashion, puts forth
blossoms of fresh grace of form, of new dyes, of doubled magnitude. The
gardener's opportunity has come. He can seize upon such of these
"sports" as he chooses and make them the confirmed habits of his wards.
Take a stroll through his parterres and greenhouses, where side by side
he shows you pansies of myriad tints and the modest little wild violets
of kindred to the pansies' ancestral stock. Let him contrast for yo