When engaged in their various occupations they often considered it expedient to escape detection by assuming invisibility, and for this object sought the assistance of certain plants, such as the fern-seed.

The vegetables were capsicums, cucumbers, yams, sweet-potatoes, garlic, onions, edible fern-roots, and radishes of the salmon variety, but thicker and more acrid in flavor.

Fetters are broken, so the fern-leaves fall, A richer growth is budding, wondrous fair, The flower of liberty shall bloom for all, And all shall breathe the healing of the air; The blessed air that wraps a people free, Within that glorious Time that is to be.

The kingfisher darts along like an arrow; fern-owls, or goat-suckers, glance in the dusk over the tops of trees like a meteor; starlings, as it were, swim along, while missel-thrushes use a wild and desultory flight; swallows sweep over the surface of the ground and water, and distinguish themselves by rapid turns and quick evolutions; swifts dash round in circles; and the bank-martin moves with frequent vacillations, like a butterfly.

From the cliff he looked down at the long bunk-house, saw the blue smoke rising straight, curled at the top like the uncoiling frond of a new fern-leaf.

Many such there are, Fair ferns and flowers, and chiefly that tall fern, So stately, of the queen Osmunda named; Plant lovelier, in its own retired abode 35 On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere, Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.

It is the falling acorn buds the tree, The falling rain that bears the greenery, The fern-plants moulder when the ferns arise.

Perhaps their lot might be so far mitigated that a maiden would be permitted to convey food to their mouths on the end of a fern-stalka much less disagreeable process for the eater.

With their fine noses in the air, and their proud necks compassionately turned toward her, they are waiting, while she pushes, panting and shrieking, through the stout fern-stems; then, leap cruelly away in airy bounds.

One of them, a great bull, ran ahead of us, roaring with fright, his antlers rattling upon bush and bough, his black bell hanging to the fern-tops.

COOK, M.C. Fern-book for Everybody.

The pines were evidently accepting the benefactions of the storm in the same whole-souled manner; and when I looked down among the budding hazels, and still lower to the young violets and fern-tufts on the rocks, I noticed the same divine methods of giving and taking, and the same exquisite adaptations of what seems an outbreak of violent and uncontrollable force to the purposes of beautiful and delicate life.

After two and one-half minutes, the leader stopped again, and gestured at heavy fern-brakes that could just be distinguished as black blotches in the dark of the woods.

The gulf is filled with flashing tides, An awful gulf no more; A maze of ferns clothes all its sides, Of mosses all its floor.

How admirable the forest-work of Nature is then seen to be, as one makes his way up through the midst of the broad, fronded branches, all arranged in exquisite order around the trunk, like the whorled leaves of lilies, and each branch and branchlet about as strictly pinnate as the most symmetrical fern-frond.