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The Good Little Leaves
October came; each leaf was dressed
In red and amber quite its best.
The hills were wrapped in faint blue haze,
And asters smiled in forest ways.
Jack Frost stole out in quiet hours,
he breathed upon the shivering flowers;
They rubbed the eyes, and bowed full low;
they nodded fast - 'twas time to go.
The leaves grew sleepy; the great tree said,
"Good night, my children, 'tis time for bed."
So the little leaves did as they were told,
And soon they were dreaming in nightgowns of gold.
The Plant Baby and Its Friends
by Kate Louise Brown
A Fellow Who Wears His Ribs Outside
It isn't because he's nothing but bones, either. He has plenty of flesh, and you have seen some of his relations dozens of times before, I have no doubt. Only you didn't know that the snug house he lives in is made of the usual bones; the ribs made broad and strongly united together to form a roof, and the breast bones widened to make his floor.
He lives in a regular fort, where he can draw in his head and feet, and bid defiance to most of his enemies. And more than that - he never leaves his fort for a moment, but carries it everywhere he goes. All he has to do is raise his roof a little, stick out four feet and a head, and he can walk off as well as anybody. Then, if surprised by and enemy, he jerks in his head and feet, snaps down his roof, and then he is snugly hidden by his shell house.
This curious fellow is a Tortoise, or turtle, and of course you [children] have seen many of his small relations, that you call mud turtles. But I want to tell you about the big ones, the Sea Turtles, that sometimes weigh many hundreds of pounds, and have shells five or six feet long. These big fellows stay in the water; they swim and dive, and remain under water for a long time. In fact, they scarcely ever come on shore, except to lay their eggs.
You must know that turtles' eggs are very nice to eat, and not only men are fond of them, but fishes, and all sorts of sea monsters devour them, and it wouldn't be safe for Mama Turtle to display any eggs there, so she swims to some quiet place with a broad sandy shore. Sometimes she travels hundreds of miles to such a place, for it is said that she will go nowhere except to the place where she was hatched herself. Then, in the night, when she thinks all men and other land monsters are asleep, she walks up on the shore, and digs a hole with her feet, nearly a yard deep.
In this hole she lays the eggs, sometimes more than a hundred of them, and then carefully covers them up with sand. Funny way to raise babies - to bury them - isn't it? But they don't stay buried very long; the heat of the sand hatches them out in fifteen or twenty days. Odd little things they are, white and about the size of a frog. They know something, however, for they rush directly off to the sea, and those who don't get eaten by big fish grow up.
Turtles have no right to complain about having their babies eaten, for they eat babies themselves - crabs, and such little fellows. I don't suppose they care much about it anyway, for they don't stay to protect them.
by Olive Thorne Miller, Little Folks in Feathers and Fur and Others in Neither (1910)
Blossom Dear
Blossom dear, what is the power
Draws the shining wings to thee?
Nestled in thy dainty bower
I can always find a bee.
Little friend, my bees find honey
Hidden deep as deep can be.
Without fear and without money
They come for these sweets to me.
Flower, flower, give me honey,
Give me honey from thy store.
I will pay with love and money;
Stores of money, and love much more.
Dear, I cannot give you honey.
Shall I truly tell you why?
Bees pay better worth than money
As they have wings but you can't fly!
So I coax them with my honey,
Feed them with my very best,
While their wings bring life to many
Waiting in the cradle nest.
For the children of the flowers
Need the precious pollen dust,
And the bees have winged powers
To bear them with this sacred trust.
by Margaret W. Morley, Flowers and Their Friends (1901)
The Plant Baby's Feet and Hands
The baby presses his feet down and lifts his hands up when he awakes.
So does the plantlet.
We call its foot the radicle. The word "radicle" means a little root.
The roots grow from the radicle.
The radicle goes down into the earth.
We call its hand the plumule. This reaches up into the air. The leaves and flowers come from it.
The word "plumule" means little plume, or feather.
The real baby screams and kicks. The plant baby is very good and patient.
You cannot keep its radicle from growing down, nor its plumule from growing upward.
[Try the following experiment at home, if you like.]
Teacher Grace, dear, do you remember what we did with our bean seeds this spring?
Grace Oh, yes! Miss Gray. We put our beans in warm water, and let them soak.
Teacher What happened to them?
Willie The shiny, outside side became loose, so that we could take it right off.
Helen We split the bean into two thick leaves.
Josephine I remember what we called them. It was a hard name, but I remember it. The thick leaves are cotyledons.
Teacher What did you find in between the cotyledons?
Howard We found a tiny radicle.
Hattie Yes, Miss Gray, and a wee, wee plumule.
Teacher The heat of the sun and the moisture of the rain woke the baby plant from its sleep. It stretched and grew big until its cradle burst.
from Kate Louise Brown's The Plant Baby and its Friends (1897)
Down in the Water
Now we must hear a story of a diver.
Strange to say, this diver has her home in the water.
Who can the diver be?
Why, another spider [the previous story in the book is also about a spider]. She says: "I will have the safest place of all for my babies. I will build my house down under the water."
So she really does make a little silken house down there.
How can she live down in the water?
She must have air to breathe.
She really brings bubbles of air with her, and fills up her little home.
There she makes her cocoon and lays her eggs.
There she raises her baby spiders.
Is she not a[n] [odd] builder?
Down in the Ground
Let us hear about the house of another spider.
She has still a different way of building her home.
She digs a rounud hole down into the earth.
But she cannot have only bare mud walls for her house.
Not she: so she works hard, as any tidy housekeeper should, to make her house look well.
She weaves the finest and most beautiful silken curtains.
She covers her walls with them.
Then she makes a door that just fits into the top of her house.
She fastens it on with a hinge.
She makes it a little larger at the top than at the bottom.
Then it cannot fall in upon her.
She covers the inside of this door with a silken curtain, too.
But it would not do to leave the outside of it mud color.
That would show everybody where she lives.
She does not wish any visitors.
Poor little thing! She knows they would not treat her well.
They might kill her and her babies.
So she covers her door outside with such plants as she sees around her.
This mother spider has a pretty safe place for her little ones.
It is very hard to find such a nest.
I think she has earned her safety.
Do you not think so?
Florence Bass, Nature Stories for Young Readers: Animal Life (1901)
The Raccoon
In March that brief summary of a bear, the raccoon, comes out of his den in the ledges, and leaves his sharp digiti-grade track upon the snow, - traveling not unfrequently in pairs, - a lean, hungry couple, bent on pillage and plunder. They have an unenviable time of it, - feasting in the summer and fall, hibernating in winter, and starving in spring. In April I have found the young of the previous year creeping about the field, so reduced by starvation as to be quite helpless, and offering no resistance to my taking them up by the tail and carrying them home.
The old ones also become very much emaciated, and come boldly to the barn or other out buildings in search of food. I remember, one morning in early spring, hearing old Cuff, the farm-dog, barking vociferously before it was yet light. When we got up we discovered him at the foot of an ash-tree, which stood about thirty rods from the house, looking up at some gray object in the leafless branches, and by his manners and his voice evincing great impatience that we were so tardy in coming to his assistance. Arrived on the spot, we saw in the tree a raccoon of an unusual size. One bold climber proposed that we go up and shake it down. This is what old Cuff wanted, and he fairly bounded with delight as he saw his young master shinning up the tree. Approaching within eight or ten feet of the raccoon, the climber seized the branch to which it clung and shook long and fiercely. But the raccoon was in no danger of losing his hold; and when the climber paused to renew his hold it turned toward him with a growl, and show very clearly a reason to advance to the attack. This caused its pursuer to descend to the ground again with all speed. When the raccoon was finally brought down with a gun, it fought the dog, which was a large, powerful animal, with great fury, returning bite for bite for some moments; and after a quarter of an hour had elapsed, and its unequal antagonist had shaken it as a terrier does a rat, making his teeth meet through the small of its back, the raccoon still showed fight.
The raccoon is very tenacious of life, and like the badger will always whip a dog of its own size and weight. A woodchuck can bite severely, having teeth that cut like chisels, but a raccoon has agility and power of limb as well.
Raccoons are considered game only in the fall, or towards the close of summer, when they become large and their flesh sweet. At this time, raccoon hunting is a famous pastime in the remote interior. As these animals are entirely nocturnal in their habits, they are hunted only at night. A piece of corn on some remote side-hill near the mountain, or between two pieces of woods, is most apt to be frequented by them. While the corn is yet green they pull the ears down like hogs, and, tearing open the sheathing of husks, eat the tender, succulent kernels, bruising and destroying much more than they can devour. Sometimes their ravages are a matter of serious concern to the farmer. But every such neighborhood has its raccoon-dog, and the boys and young men dearly love the sport. The party sets out about eight or nine o'clock of a dark, moonless night, and stealthily approaches the cornfield. The dog knows his business, and when he is put into a patch of corn and told to "hunt them up" he makes a thorough search, and will not be misled by any other scent. You hear him rattling through the corn, hither and yon, with great speed.The raccoons prick up their ears, and quickly take themselves off to the opposite side of the field. In the stillness you may sometimes hear a single stone rattle against the wall as they hurry toward the woods. If the dog finds nothing he comes back to his master in a short time, and says in his way, "No raccoons in there." But if he strikes a trail, you presently hear a louder rattling on the stone wall, then a hurried bark as he enters the woods, succeeded in a few minutes by loud and repeated barkings as he reaches the foot of the tree of which the raccoon has taken refuge. Then follows a pellmell rush as the raccoon hunting party dash up the hill, into the woods, through the brush and the darkness, falling over prostrate trees, pitching into gullies and hollows, losing hats and tearing clothes, till finally, guided by the baying of their faithful dog, they reach the tree. The first thing now in order is to kindle a fire, and, if its light reveals the 
raccoon, to shoot him; if not, to fell the tree with an axe, unless this last expedient happens to be too great a sacrifice off timber and of strength, in which case it is necessary to sit down at the foot of the tree and wait till morning.
John Burroughs, Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers (1914)
"The Brown Baby Who Lives in the Basement"
I wonder how you'd like to be one of the brown babies who live in our basement - and yours too, no doubt.
How would you like it, every time you put your head out of doors, to find a fierce lion, or a sly, bloodthirsty tiger, waiting to snap you up? Would it be pleasant to have to work hard for every dinner you ate, often being obliged to dig through a wall before you got anything?
How would you like having the world filled with monstrous giants, who took delight in chasing and killing you?
Well that's the life the poor brown baby lives. Do you suppose he likes it any better than you? And it's just the same with his mamma and papa, brothers and sisters, and, in fact, the whole family.
To be sure he's nothing but a rat. But then you're nothing but a child, and his dinner and his life are as dear to him as yours are to you.
But then he steals our food, did you say?
Well, that's only because he must have something to eat. Besides, I don't believe he was ever taught any better. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he thought men were made on purpose to collect food for him.
Then he gnaws holes in our walls.
That's true, and it's very troublesome to us; but when you know the whole truth about his gnawing business, I think you'll feel quite sorry for him.
You see, the rats teeth are very singular things. In the first place, they are shaped like a wedge; the inside is very soft and easily worn off, while the outside is very hard enamel. But the strangest thing is that they grow all the time. If you should feed him as much as he could eat, he would still have to gnaw something hard to keep his teeth worn off. If he didn't, they would grow into the mouth above and kill him at last.
Rats have been found who had lost one tooth. The tooth opposite, having nothing to gnaw against had grown out to a fearful length. In case of a lower one, it grew up into his skull. One that I read of (an upper tooth) was gradually pressed out till it fairly grew into the shape of a ring, sticking out of his mouth.
Did you ever know of a tame rat? If you went to Siam, you'd see plenty. They are fed and petted as you pet your kitten, lie by the fire, and jump into your lap like a cat or dog. They grow very large, and keep the house clear of their unfortunate relatives.
I've hear too of another one that was tamed by a stage-driver. His business was to guard his master's dinner-basket, which was carried in the stage.
You needn't think this brown baby is a nobody. He has his history, as well as you. We don't know what legends the old gray rats tell to the young ones in the long winter evening; but we do know what men tell about them.
It seems that, once upon a time, a great tribe of rats lived in Persia, in roomy houses, which they made underground. There they might have stayed to this day but for an earthquake, a hundred or two years ago. Feeling that there home was no longer safe they decided to emigrate. They started west, like other emigrants, swam rivers, and came to settle in Europe. The people there did not like them, I suppose, any better than the buffalo likes those who emigrate to the West in our country. But they stayed and made their homes there, nevertheless.
Rats are made useful in other ways besides as hunters. In China they are eaten, and in Paris their skins are made into gloves. In London they are a source of amusement, and profit. In that city, and other large towns in England, there are professional rat-catchers - men who make it their business to go from house to house and clear out the rats. As a sign of their business, they wear a brass image of a rat, and charge a certain amount for each one they catch. How they do it is a professional secret, for they don't kill them, but carry them of in bags to sell.
...
Rats have been trained to entertain an audience in another way. A troop of them was exhibited, a few years ago, in Europe, who walked on their hind legs, and went through a sort of play, one act of which was to hang a cat and dance round the body.
N.B. - The cat was a stuffed one.
These brown babies have white cousins called Albino rats. They have snowy white coats, and pink eyes. They are as lively as squirrels, and are kept as pets, whenever they are caught. They are extremely neat about their personal appearances, spending most of their time in cleaning their fur and their face.
They also have other brown cousins that live in California and build houses for themselves. Rats are very fond of society, you know, and these California fellows build regular villages. They select a nice place where trees are thick, and make a four or five feet high, shaped like an Indian hut.
Each house has five or six doors near the ground, besides numerous halls and passageways that lead under ground. They are built sometimes of sticks and chips, and sometimes of bones.
by Olive Thorne Miller, Little Folks in Feathers and Fur, and Others in Neither (1879)
"A Flowerless Flour Garden"
We all know, in a general way, that nothing grows unless it is alive, and yet who ever thinks of bread dough as having life in it? There never was a garden bed so full of living plants as is the loaf when it is moulded into shape, and ready to be put in the oven. If you have never watched the mixing of bread, I would advise you to go and look at it the first chance you have, for it is a very curious and entertaining bit of gardening. The cook first prepares her seed, which is the yeast. There are several ways of planting the common flower-seed, and so there are of planting yeast. You may either soak the seed to make them sprout quickly, or you may start the little plants in a hot-bed; or, again, you may buy your young seedlings, and transplant them into your own garden plot. Just so you can get your yeast seed ready to plant. The yeast cake may be only melted in warm water, or it may be set to start in a cup of water and flour by the warm kitchen fire, or you may buy the yeast already grown at the baker's.
When the seed or seedlings are ready, the garden plot is prepared. The cook heaps up in her bread bowl quarts of snowy flour. Into this heap, after making a hole, she pours her prepared yeast. Working the bread is only another name for the careful scattering of the seed through all the dough, that it may spring up and grow, and fill the whole mass with the tiny plants.
The yeast plant is not a common kind of plant, but belongs to the same class as mushrooms and toadstools, and the fuzzy, cottony growth that we call mould. There are two kinds of plants that we may find almost anywhere in the fields and woods, and even in the city yards - the fungi and the green plants. The yeast plant is one of the fungi. These look very different in most respects from the green plants: they can live and grow and thrive in darkness; they do not have either leaves or flowers, and they usually spring up and die very quickly. The greatest difference between the two kinds is, however, that the fungi live on food that has been alive before - on plants and animals or decaying matter - while the green plants live on what they can get out of the earth, and the air, and the water.
The simplest of all the fungi is the yeast plant. It begins its life as a tiny egg-shaped bag, or sac. This cell, as it is called, is filled with a very curious jelly, perhaps the most wonderful thing in the world. It is now found in everything that lives and grows. By its help the little yeast plant can take the flour and water, and can change it so that while the paste is used up and disappears, the cells grow larger and sprout out buds. You have particles of this jelly, or protoplasm, lining your mouth and stomach, and the food you eat is changed into flesh and blood and bones by this wonder-working magician. In the figures, the grainy substance is the protoplasm.
This jelly all seems to be pretty much alike, no matter in what plant or animal you find it; but there is some marvellous difference somewhere - a difference that science has never reached. The yeast cell takes in certain food, and grows, but it never makes anything but other or larger yeast cells. The food you eat and digest makes just you; more of you, perhaps, but still you, yourself and nobody else.
Like all living things, the tiny yeast cell must eat and breathe, or it will die. It feeds, not by opening its mouth and taking in its food, but by lying bathed in it, and soaking it up though its skin. When the cook dissolves her yeast cake, and puts it into the mixture of flour and water we call dough, she is putting the little plant into its food bath. The cells which have been so long in prison, shut up in the darkness and cold of the dried yeast, begin to look alive, and stretch themselves, and enjoy their liberty. They take kindly to their food right away, and begin helping themselves to what they find about them. They do not merely soak up the flour and water in which they are plunged, but they manage to extract from the compound just what they need to grow.
The cells must not only feed to survive, but they must also breathe, they must somehow get oxygen, which is the gas that our breathing takes out of the air. And this they extract, as a miner does iron, by separating it from its ore. There is a certain amount of sugar in wheat, which gives to good bread and to cracked wheat their delicate sweetness in flavor. Sugar is made up of a number of different substances, which the yeast cell has the power of separating. It takes the oxygen for its own use, and leaves behind the other things that make up the sugar. The change that goes on in the flour and the water under the influence of the yeast plant is called fermenting.
Feeding and breathing this way, by taking what it needs from the flour, the cell grows. When it has reached its mature size, it rests quietly for a while, as if it were gathering strength for the effort, and then it sends out a little bud, which grows like the parent cell, until another bud sprouts from the end of the new sac. When this is grown, it is very unlike our notion of a plant; it is really nothing more than a chain of sacs growing end to end. As soon as the little plant has exhausted all the sugar and food substance of the flour, it stops growing, the cells separate and remain quite still.
There is just one time in the growth of the plant when the dough is right for baking. Before it has grown enough, the bubbles through the dough are too few or too small, and the bread, if baked at this stage, would be heavy. These bubbles are the carbonic acid gas left behind when the oxygen has been taken out of the sugar, and there must be plenty of them to make the bread light. If the bread is left to long to rise, the cells get more than their share of wheat-sugar, and the bread is sour. Just at the right stage, which every good bread-maker can tell by experience, a thorough baking will destroy the alcohol - which is one of the things left behind while the yeast is growing - and the bread will be both sweet and light.
When the yeast plant is sowed on top of the flour and water, instead of buried in it, all this is very different. The plant takes its food from the paste, but it does not need the sugar to supply it with oxygen, so it lets that alone. It can get its oxygen in a much simpler way, right from the air, as we do, and does not need to go through the labor of smelting it out of the sugar. The raising of our bread by yeast is entirely due to the efforts of the tiny cells to get a breath of air when we have smothered them up in the dough.
There are other plants besides the yeast plant that act in the same way. Have you never heard your mother say when she open a jar of preserves, "These are alright, I know, for they are covered with mould?" Mould is a good deal like yeast in some things; if the germ cell, or spore, falls upon the top of the sweetmeats, it can get plenty of oxygen from the air, and so lets the sugar alone. But if it is nearly in the sirup, it will get its oxygen somehow, and so the sugar has to be sacrificed, and preserves are left to spoil. What else could you expect from such little mischief-makers if you shut them up with the sweetmeats?
The yeast plant is so very, very small that you cannot see it except with a very fine magnifying glass. But there are other plants like it which are large enough to be seen with a small and not costly microscope. These are what we call moulds. If you want to study moulds, nothing is easier than to prepare them. Mix a spoonful of flour with cold water, and spread the paste over the bottom of a plate or saucer. In a few days it will be covered all over. If you put it in a damp dark place, the mould will sprout sooner. You might put away piece of bread at the same time, and find it covered with a growth too.
Take a bit of this paste on the blade of a knife, and examine it carefully. You will see among the cottony fibres a number of black or white or yellow heads, which gives the mould a speckled look. Under the microscope you see a perfect jungle of growth - a tangle of threads, which look like spun glass, running here and there and everywhere. From these, which serve as roots to the mould, the stems spring up, bearing, instead of leaves or flowers, glistening toadstools that look as though they were made of pearl; or sometimes the heads look like strings of little pearls, or at others they are rosettes of such strings. The black and sage-green colors come later, and are the fruit, or seed-bearing portion of the plant.
On my saucer of paste I found a plantation of delicate yellow fungi. The stems came up thick, 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 where delicate like grasses in seed, all looking like spun glass. The largest kind of common mould is not so 
beautiful as these I have just described, but it shows very well the way fungi grow and form their seed, and then sow themselves. This plant is easily seen with the naked eye, but looked at through the Child's Microscope, you can see a great deal more. 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 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 plant 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 in Figs. 3, 4, and 5.
The toadstool, whose picture is the first of all fungi given here, is much larger than the mould, but almost as simple. It is made up of millions of little cells in strings or in flat plates, most of them like each other. This is very different from the cells in the higher plants; they have different kinds of cells for different services, as we shall see after a while.
It is worth while sometimes to get away from the every-day world, and learn the wonders that are to be found within the fairy ring to which the microscope admits us.
Story by Sophie B. Herrick,
Chapters on Plant Life
There are many more chapters on plant life in Herrick's work. Just ask for it when you visit the Lloyd next time.
"The Domestic Cat"
A cat when well treated is one of the most charming pets you can have. She will run to meet you when you come into the house; and will follow you wherever you go, purring loudly, and rubbing against you as though she couldn't make enough of you.
On changing their place of abode people have sometimes left their pet cat behind them, perhaps fifty or sixty miles away. Yet, in some cases, the cat has followed them, and found them out two or three days after, though she could not have known which way her friends had gone.
Cats also have a great power of finding their way back to their home, and have been known to return after being sent to great distances. For instance, a cat was sent to some friends forty or fifty miles away, and was carried in a closed basket inside a carriage. Yet, though the animal could not have known the way by which it was taken, it returned to its old home two months after, and carried two of its kittens the whole way.
People say that animals cannot talk; but, though they are unable to use words like ours, most creatures can speak in their own way.
For instance, when a cat is happy and pleased, she purrs, and shows what her feelings are. If she is unhappy, or in pain, or hungry, she mews; if she is angry, she sets up her back and spits; if she is teased, she growls; and so on. Then, if she is treated in a way she does not like, up goes her tail straight in the air, and she walks out 
of the room. So a pet cat can really make herself understood almost as well as if she had the gift of speech.
by Rev. J. G. Wood, My Backyard Zoo
Call number: QL706.W652 91886)
"The Snowy Owl"
A gardener was once working in a garden when he heard a very strange noise from the top of a tree. As he was very expert, he climbed up to see where the noise came from, and what it was that made it. When he got half way up the tree, two fierce white creatures dashed out and attacked him with beak and claws, making at the same time a terrible screaming.
They were, as the intruder found to his cost, a pair of owls taking care of their young in a nest at the top of the tree. And an owl in passion is no pleasant object to meet with.
The man hurried down as fast as he could, but had some difficulty in keeping off the owls. In spite of the daylight, they darted at him again and again, wheeled round his head, and even pursued him, much scratched and frightened, to the very door of his retreat.
[About the owl:]
But, as a rule, the owl lies very safe and snug in his roost, and does not stir till twilight. He is a very curious bird...
He is a bird of prey, for he hunts mice and rats, and even small birds if they chance to be about in the twilight. His feet are formed on purpose to grasp prey. The toes are feathered; the first toe is the shortest, and the fourth toe is longer and can be turned backwards. The claws are long and curved, and very sharp.
Do you notice the thick plumage of the owl? It is as fine and soft as possible; and when he drops from the branch of a tree to the ground, which he sometimes does, when 
he chances to spy a poor little mouse moving beneath, he makes no sound: the mouse cannot tell he is there until it feels the sharp talons.
by M. & E. Kirby. Stories About Birds [18??]
Call no.: QL676.2.K54