"This soil is too hard. We can never get through. Bend down! Bend down!"
So the roots bent down until they came to softer soil, then forward, but always working up toward their natural level, and so it was at their natural level they came out on the other side.
A ROOT'S STRANGE ADVENTURE WITH A SHOE
But here's an example of "presence of mind," that nobody has accounted for. A good-sized root, working along through the soil, like Little Brother Mole, to earn its board and keep, came right up against the sole of somebody's old shoe that had got buried in the soil. In the sole were a lot of holes where the stitches used to be. The root divided into many parts, and many of these smaller roots found their way through the stitch holes. Then, coming out on the other side, these little roots got together and travelled on, side by side!
HOW THE RAG BABIES TELL THE FORTUNE OF THE SEED CORN
In what is popularly called "the Rag Baby Test" the seed corn is placed on squares marked on cloth with numbers corresponding to the numbered ears. Then they are rolled up in one of those moistened rags until they sprout.
Isn't that a story for you? But there's no accounting for it. As we have seen, the men of science know a little bit about how a root manages to turn round and round and away from the light and so on, but what kind of machinery or process is it that could tell the root if it would split up into little threads it could get through the stitch holes in that old boot? You can't imagine; at least, nobody so far has thought how it was done. But it's all true. We'll find the story and a lot of other things about the ways of roots in one of the books we'll get acquainted with when we come to the "Hide and Seek."