4. Going out to the garden, I bring in a bit of old brick, emerald green on its rugged surface,[6] and a thick piece of mossy turf. First, for the old brick: To think of the quantity of pleasure one has had in one's life from that emerald green velvet,--and yet that for the first time to-day I am verily going to look at it! Doing so, through a pocket {14} lens of no great power, I find the velvet to be composed of small star-like groups of smooth, strong, oval leaves,--intensely green, and much like the young leaves of any other plant, except in this;--they all have a long brown spike, like a sting, at their ends. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] 5. Fastening on that, I take the Flora Danica,[7] and look through its plates of mosses, for their leaves only; and I find, first, that this spike, or strong central rib, is characteristic;--secondly, that the said leaves are apt to be not only spiked, but serrated, and otherwise angry-looking at the points;--thirdly, that they have a tendency to fold together in the centre (Fig. 1[8]); and at last, after an hour's work at them, it strikes me suddenly that they are more like pineapple leaves than anything else. And it occurs to me, very unpleasantly, at the same time, that I don't know what a pineapple is! Stopping to ascertain that, I am told that a pineapple belongs to the 'Bromeliaceae'--(can't stop to find out what that means)--nay, that of these plants "the pineapple is the representative" (Loudon); "their habit is acid, their leaves rigid, and toothed with spines, their {15} bracteas often coloured with scarlet, and their flowers either white or blue"--(what are their flowers like?) But the two sentences that most interest me, are, that in the damp forests of Carolina, the Tillandsia, which is an 'epiphyte' (_i.e._, a plant growing on other plants,) "forms dense festoons among the branches of the trees, vegetating among the black mould that collects upon the bark of trees in hot damp countries; other species are inhabitants of deep and gloomy forests, and others form, with their spring leaves, an impenetrable herbage in the Pampas of Brazil." So they really seem to be a kind of moss, on a vast scale. 6. Next, I find in Gray,[9] Bromeliaceae, and--the very thing I want--"Tillandsia, the black _moss_, or long moss, which, _like most Bromelias_, grows on the branches of trees." So the pineapple is really a moss; only it is a moss that flowers but 'imperfectly.' "The fine fruit is caused by the consolidation of the imperfect flowers." (I wish we could consolidate some imperfect English moss-flowers into little pineapples then,--though they were only as big as filberts.) But we cannot follow that farther now; nor consider when a flower is perfect, and when it is not, or we should get into morals, and I don't know where else; we will go back to the moss I have gathered, for I begin to see my way, a little, to understanding it. {16}