There is a beautiful little French story which has been translated into English, and called "Picciola," the Italian for little flower. It is the story of a French nobleman who was thrown into prison on an unjust charge of plotting against the government of his country. He was a man of talent and education, as well as of wealth and position. Somehow, with all his life had given him, it had never taught him to look with open eyes at nature, or to see beyond nature a God who had created it.

He was restless and impatient in his close cell and the little strip of court-yard where he paced up and down, and up and down, in his misery, longing to be free. One day he saw between the heavy paving-stones of the yard the earth raised up into a tiny mound. His heart bounded at the thought that some of his friends were digging up from below to reach him, and give him his liberty again.

But when he came to examine the spot closely he found it was only a little plant pushing the earth before it in its effort to reach the light and the air. With the bitter sense of disappointment which this discovery brought, he was about to crush the little intruder with his foot, and then a feeling of compassion stopped him, and its life was spared.

The plant grew and throve in its prison, and the Count de Charney became every day fonder of his fellow-prisoner; he spent hours, which had before been empty, watching it as it grew and developed, until it became the absorbing interest of his life. As he watched it day by day, and saw the contrivances by which it managed to live and grow, he was compelled to believe that there must be somewhere a great and wonderful power that could design and make so marvellous a thing. The little flower was like a little child taking him by the hand; and leading him away from his dark, bitter, unbelieving thoughts into the light of God's love.

I want to take some common flower, something you have seen a hundred times every summer of your lives, and show you a few of the marvellous contrivances that make it able to live and grow and bear blossoms and fruit. If you will study them closely for a while, it will not seem so strange then that the Count de Charney, who had lived so many years without learning anything of the wonders of nature, should have had them opened for him by one little flower that he had carefully watched and studied.

Most plants are alike in having roots, stems, and leaves, and some sort of flower and seed-vessel. But the parts look so very different in different plants that it is sometimes a little hard to tell which is which. In some the roots grow in the air, and in others the stems grow underground. It is only by studying what the parts do that it is possible to be sure what they are. The most important part of every living thing is its stomach, because everything that lives must eat and drink, or die. There are some very curious plants which have regular stomachs into which their food goes, just as it does in an animal, and is digested, but these are not very common. Some day, however, when we have learned a little more about simpler things, I mean to tell you something about these strange plants. Ordinary plants have roots to supply them with food and water in the place of a stomach.

Let us study the roots of some plant. Almost anything will do. If you can do so, get a hyacinth glass and bulb. The bulb is the root, and looks very much like an onion; the glass is a vase made for the purpose of growing hyacinths in water. It slopes in from the bottom upward, and then bulges out suddenly. The bulb rests in this bulging part, and has water below it and around its lower part. The glass being clear, you can see the roots grow as plainly as you can see a leaf or a flower bud unfold. Perhaps you have no hyacinth glass, and can not get one; then try to make one for yourself out of a small glass jar. There will certainly be a pickle bottle or a preserve jar about the house that will answer perfectly well. All you want is to have the bulb rest half in and half out of the water, with room below for the roots to spread through the water. Be careful to keep the water up to the right mark by adding a little every day as the plant soaks it up.

Or you may take a dozen grains of seed corn, soak them overnight, and then plant them an inch deep in a box, having about six inches or more depth of good earth. In about three days the blade will come above ground. Put your hand or a trowel down beside one of the plants, and scoop it gently up. Be sure you make your hand or trowel go away down below where the seed was planted, so as not to bruise the tender growth. Shake and blow the dust away, and you will see several little white thread-like roots coming from the grain. If you take up in this way all the young plants, one or two every day, you will see how they sprout and grow.

If you have a microscope[1] and a sharp knife, carefully split the end of one of these roots and look at it. If you have not, you will have to trust me so far as to take this drawing as correct (Fig. 1). All these tiny roots have a cap over their growing end, so that when they have to push their way among the hard earth and stones, the growing part will not get bruised. These roots take in all the water and the food which the earth supplies to the plant.

The hyacinth can grow in water alone, because it has been a provident little body, and stored away enough food in the little round carpet-bag of a bulb to supply the plant for the few weeks of its life. It only asks for the water it needs to keep it alive and growing. When the thirsty little roots have sucked up water enough, the bulb begins to grow in the other direction. If you look, you will see a solid lump of pale green come up from the top like the horns of a calf, or a baby's tooth. This is the young plant coming up out of its dark cradle into the light and air and sunshine. The delicate growing end of the plant, which will after a while bear its beautiful spike of bells, is very tenderly wrapped up in the leaves. After it gets through the tough skin of the bulb, the plant grows straight up. It stretches itself after its long sleep in the sweet air and light, the leaves lengthen and broaden and open out, and the stem with its little knobby buds comes up in the midst. These will soon grow and unfold into beauty and fragrance, and you will be rewarded for all your long waiting, if watching the wonderful growth day by day has not carried its own reward with it.

Many plants are grown from roots or bulbs, but a greater majority by far come from seed. Tulips and lilies, onions and potatoes, are all instances of plants grown from roots which sprout out from the old ones. The root is in every case the beginning, the seed the ending, of the life of a plant.

Take two of the commonest of our window and garden plants—the geranium and the heart's-ease. Let us take the geranium first. On the cluster of bloom we will probably find flowers partly withered, flowers full blown, and buds nearly ready to open. Look at a full-blown flower. You will see with your naked eye something standing up in the middle which looks like a tiny pink lily; around it are little rounded white spikes. If you carefully strip off the green cap outside, and then the colored petals, you will find a lily like the one in the figure (Fig. 2); this is called the pistil. Now open one of the nearly blown buds; you will find the lily pistil still closed, and on two of the spikes around it two double-barrelled rosy pods. When the pods, or stamens, are nearly ripe, they look for all the world like a pink gum-drop made in the shape of a French roll. If they are ripe they look as you see in Fig. 3.

To make a perfect seed the stamen and pistil have to enter into partnership. The stamen sends out thousands of clear orange pollen grains (Fig. 3, b), and when these fall on the top of the lily or pistil, as some have done in. Fig. 2, they stick fast. The lily, for all its innocent look, has laid a trap for them; it is covered with a sticky substance that holds them fast. The tiny little grain begins to send out a tube like a little hose-pipe, which grows down and down to the bottom of the lily. There it finds some very small egg-shaped bodies called ovules (Fig. 2, o). The busy little hose-pipe pushes its way into a little opening at the end of one of the ovules, pumps away till the pollen grain is empty, and the liquid out of it is all safely stored in the ovule, and then it withers away. The ovule when it is ripe is a seed, but if the pollen has not emptied itself in the way just described, the ovule dies.

If you look at Fig. 4 you will see the pistil of a pansy, or heart's-ease. No. 1 is a side view of the pistil sliced down so you can see into it, as you can into a baby-house. You see the pollen grains, b, sending down their tubes to the ovules, o. No. 2 in this drawing is the front view of the heart's-ease pistil. The beautiful colored leaves of a flower are only meant to cover and protect the pistil and the pollen of the plant, as the fruit is meant to cover its seed. There has been a tender care for us in all this that the covering for both should have been made so beautiful and so delicious.