7. The second piece I have on the table is a cluster--an inch or two deep--of the moss that grows everywhere, and that the birds use for nest-building, and we for packing, and the like. It is dry, since yesterday, and its fibres define themselves against the dark ground in warm green, touched with a glittering light. Note that burnished lustre of the minute leaves; they are necessarily always relieved against dark hollows, and this lustre makes them much clearer and brighter than if they were of dead green. In that lustre--and it is characteristic of them--they differ wholly from the dead, aloe-like texture of the pineapple leaf; and remind me, as I look at them closely, a little of some conditions of chaff, as on heads of wheat after being threshed. I will hunt down that clue presently; meantime there is something else to be noticed on the old brick. [Illustration: FIG. 2.] 8. Out of its emerald green cushions of minute leaves, there rise, here and there, thin red threads, each with a little brown cap, or something like a cap, at the top of it. These red threads shooting up out of the green tufts, are, I believe, the fructification of the moss; fringing its surface in the woods, and on the rocks, with the small forests of brown stems, each carrying its pointed cap or crest--of infinitely varied 'mode,' as we shall see presently; and, which is one of their most blessed functions, carrying high the dew in the morning; every spear balancing its own crystal globe. 9. And now, with my own broken memories of moss {17} and this unbroken, though unfinished, gift of the noble labour of other people, the Flora Danica, I can generalize the idea of the precious little plant, for myself, and for the reader. All mosses, I believe, (with such exceptions and collateral groups as we may afterwards discover, but they are not many,) that is to say, some thousands of species, are, in their strength of existence, composed of fibres surrounded by clusters of dry _spinous_ leaves, set close to the fibre they grow on. Out of this leafy stern descends a fibrous root, and ascends in its season, a capped seed. We must get this very clearly into our heads. Fig. 2, A, is a little tuft of a common wood moss of Norway,[10] in its fruit season, of its real size; but at present I want to look at the central fibre and its leaves accurately, and understand that first. 10. Pulling it to pieces, we find it composed of seven little company-keeping fibres, each of which, by itself, appears as in Fig. 2, B: but as in this, its real size, it {18} is too small, not indeed for our respect, but for our comprehension, we magnify it, Fig. 2, C, and thereupon perceive it to be indeed composed of, _a_, the small fibrous root which sustains the plant; _b_, the leaf-surrounded stem which is the actual being, and main creature, moss; and, _c_, the aspirant pillar, and cap, of its fructification.