Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/283

blance to feathers, though they were not flat, but round. At the abrupt end of the rootlet, as if cut off, was a larger dewdrop. On examining them more closely, feeling and tasting them, I found that it was not frost, but a clear crystalline dew in almost invisible drops, concentrated from the dampness of the cavern, perhaps melted frost preserving by its fineness its original color, thus regularly arranged around the delicate white fibre. Looking again, incredulous, I discerned extremely minute white threads or gossamer standing out on all sides from the main rootlet and affording the core for these drops. Yet on those fibres which had lost their dew, none of these minute threads appeared. . . . . It impressed me as a wonderful piece of chemistry, that the very grass we trample on and esteem so cheap should be thus wonderfully nourished, that this spring greenness was not produced by coarse and cheap means, but that in the sod out of sight the most delicate and magical processes are going on. The half is not shown. . . . . I brought home some tufts of the grass in my pocket, but when I took it out, I could not at first find those pearly white fibres and thought they were lost, for they were shrunk to dry brown threads, and as for the still finer gossamer which supported the roscid droplets, with few exceptions