"Very much the same, and it belongs to the flowerless class, too, along with the mosses and lichens and ferns and mushrooms. It has spores instead of seeds, and is really a sort of a moss of the sea."
"Oh, call us not weeds, we are flowers of the sea,
For lovely and bright and fresh-tinted are we,"
sang little Prue, with a memory of her kindergarten.
"Yes, they are flowers of the sea, though they do not bloom," said the Chief Gardener, "and are very beautiful in color and form. I will give you some white cards and you can gather specimens to dry. You spread out the little branches with a tooth-pick, and the cards make pretty little books afterwards."
"But do seaweeds and mosses and lichens and ferns and mushrooms all belong to one family?" asked Davy.
"Oh, by no means. Not even all to the same division of flowerless plants. But it is too hard a study for a little boy, and it is enough to learn now that they do all belong to the big flowerless or Crip-tog-a-mous class."
"Papa, is it true that if you put fern seeds in your shoes, nobody can see you?" asked little Prue.
"Why, I don't very well see how 'nobody' could see you, but I think somebody might."
"It says in my fairy book that the princess put fern seed in her shoe, and then there wasn't any one who could see her. I wish it was like that. I'm going to try it," and the little girl pulled off some of the brown spores and tucked them in her dusty ties.