Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/717

1868.] If you have an eye for such things, as you hurry down to count your gold in your sunless counting-room, and pass before some city churches, look up, for you may catch waving around their walls the slender shadow-form of the poa, bathed in the morning air, happy on its giddy height, and asking nothing of the earth, from which you expect all. Swallows, skimming the blue, repeat their gladsome twitterings around it, and the night wind, so solemn and so sad, sweeps in music-tones over it, as if it felt its sweet beauty; but you, do you see it?

Another pretty grass, called the wood melic (melica uniflora), is known of every roamer of woodlands and cool mountain recesses. Its stem is so airy and delicate, that the green flower it bears droops downward the moment it opens.

None of our grasses are injurious, except the bearded darnel (loliuin temulentum). This looks very much like wheat, until both plants are in the ear; and, formerly, superstitious farmers believed that in wet summers the wheat did change into darnel. Virgil mentions the infelix lolium, and Shakespeare remembers it in his enumeration of baneful plants rooting themselves upon fallow leas. Pious writers believe it to be the plant referred to in the Parable of the Sower. To-day, the French call the darnel ivraie, from the word ivre, because it is said to produce symptoms similar to intoxication. Chinese legislation disdains not to occupy itself with that little denizen of the field, and has made a law prohibiting the admixture of the darnel grain with fermented liquors. The perennial darnel, however, which affects our waysides and pastures, has no such dangerous quality, and is as good for cattle as it is pleasant to the eye.

The genus of fescue grasses abounds in very valuable specimens. The most common of them all is the sheep's fescue grass (festuca ovina), and is soon recognized by its delicate tufts, its short, curved leaves, and its low stem. It is said that, in England, sheep that feed upon that grass produce the best mutton. It is also excellent for lawns, as it forms a thick, close turf, and allows no intrusion among its roots and leaves.

Generally, by the middle of June the field grasses are beginning to go to seed; and then is the best time to notice the meadow fox-tail, so common and so characteristic a meadow grass, that everybody knows its look. Stumpy in form, it has none of that feathery elegance of motion that gives to other grasses the appearance of a foam of bloom, borne upward on the surface of meadows by under wind-currents. The fox-tail is of a yellowish green color, and is bearded with short, silvery hairs. Its country-cousin, the slender fox-tail, also called in some districts mouse-tail, has, on the contrary, a purplish colored spike, and grows alike in salt marshes and by the wayside. Then there is the floating fox-tail, which is found in wet meadows, and sometimes thrives as well on lands far removed from rivers. When, however, it grows in the neighborhood of streams, its roots are fibrous, being then sufficiently watered by the moisture of the soil. But when it has only occasional rain-showers or dews to depend upon for the quenching of its thirsty nature, its roots become bulbous-soft, and then suck a supply of moisture that keeps them flourishing even in the midst of drought.

Every country child knows well, and has played with the common cat's tail or timothy grass (phleum pratense). An American gave it to Europe about the year 1718, but we still retain it in most of our meadows, where it is as familiar as the shrill cry of the cricket. The sea cat's-tail grass, like other creeping grasses, is of great service in binding the loose sandy soil of the shore. So, also,