On my saucer of paste I found in one place a plantation of delicate yellow fungi. The stems came up thick, with the little round fruit at the end of each, looking as if the whole thing was carved out of amber. In another place, over the yawning caverns made by the cracks in the paste, there were delicate forms like grasses in seed, all looking like spun glass. The largest kind of common mould, which you may see in Fig. 5, is not so beautiful as these I have just described, but it shows very well the way the fungi grow, and form their seed, and then sow themselves. This plant is easily seen without any microscope, but looked at through the little Excelsior glass, you see a great deal more. The stalks look as they do in Fig. 5 a. If you are so fortunate as to have a large microscope, and watch them from day to day, you will see them look as they do in Fig. 5 b, and finally, when the outer skin breaks, like c, in the same illustration.
A single spoonful of flour will give you this wonderful garden, with its crop of yeast plant, if you sow the seed, or, if you trust to luck, its harvest of chance-sown mould. The air is full of these spores of the mould plants, and wherever they find a place they will take possession of it, and grow up without planting or cultivating, as weeds do. You can be certain of your yeast crop, because you have sowed it; but you must take your chances with the mould. You are almost sure, however, to find in any saucer of paste the different kinds described and pictured in Figs. 3, 4, and 5.
It is worth while sometimes to get away from the every-day world, and learn the wonders that are to be found in the fairy ring to which the microscope admits us.
[ANOTHER BEAR STORY.]
BY ORVILLE DEANE.
Mr D——, one of our neighbors, was going after his cows one night, and had a singular bit of experience. He kept the cattle near a meadow, and in going for them had to pass through a clump of bushes where raspberries and blackberries were abundant. The path was very narrow, and in some places so much overgrown by the bushes that a person might be very near an object and not see it. Suddenly a large bear rose up before him, and sat on his haunches not three feet away. Mr. D—— was a tall and very powerful man, and not easily frightened, but he didn't like such familiarity as that. There was no time to retreat, and he had no weapon with which to defend himself, but he clinched his huge fist, and struck the bear a terrific blow between the eyes. Bruin was not prepared for this, and as he sat up so straight, and could not brace himself quick enough, the blow knocked him clean over upon his back in the bushes. He roared, and scrambled to his feet, and ran off as fast as his legs could carry him, much more disturbed by the event than Mr. D—— was.
A year or two after this, my father and I were out gathering raspberries one afternoon in August. We were in a field close by a wood, where several acres were covered with the bushes, and as it was newly cleared land, they grew very tall. Indeed, a person might be picking berries ten feet distant from you, and, if he kept quiet, you would not know it.
After a while we climbed upon the trunk of a fallen tree, for the sake of reaching some high bushes that were bending under the weight of luscious fruit, when we saw a bear, not more than ten feet distant, helping himself to the same berries. At first he did not see us, and we watched him for a little as he ate the fruit. It was surprising how skillfully he would take a bush in his paws and hold it down while he ate off the berries, and then let it go and catch another.
But we wanted those raspberries, and father shouted and swung his pail around his head, thinking to drive the bear away. But the beast did not propose to be disturbed in that way, and seemed to think he had as much right there as we. He simply let go the bushes, and looked at us.