Here's another example of the same thing; what we have called "presence of mind," resourcefulness, invention. This example is even more striking, if possible, because, for one thing, it is a case where roots still more completely altered their habits to save a tree struggling for its life on a stony mountain cliff. Maeterlinck tells about it in his picturesque and dramatic style. The subject--the hero, as it were--of this story was a laurel-tree growing on some cliff above a chasm at the bottom of which ran a mountain torrent. "It was easy to see in its twisted and, so to say, writhing trunk, the whole drama of its hard and tenacious life. The young stem had started from a vertical plane, so that its top, instead of rising toward the sky, bent down over the gulf. It was obliged, therefore, notwithstanding the weight of its branches, stubbornly to bend its disconcerted trunk into the form of an elbow close to the rock, and thus, like a swimmer who throws back his head, by means of an incessant will, to hold the heavy leaves straight up into the sky." This bent arm, in course of time, struggling with wind and storm, grew so that it swelled out in knots and cords, like muscles upholding a terrific burden. But the strain finally proved too much. The tree began to crack at the elbow and decay set in. "The leafy dome grew heavier, while a hidden canker gnawed deeper into the tragic arm that supported it in space. Then, obeying I know not what order of instinct, two stout roots, issuing from the trunk at some considerable distance above the elbow, grew out and moored it to the granite wall." As if the roots, naturally so afraid of light, had heard a frantic call for help and, regardless of everything, had come to the rescue. To be sure, certain roots--the prop-roots of corn-stalks, for instance, as you have noticed--habitually reach from above ground down into the soil, and serve to brace the tall stem swaying in the winds, but trees usually have no such roots and no such habits. Yet, here a tree seems suddenly to have learned, somehow, that elsewhere in the land of plants this thing is done. But how did it learn it? Did the brownies or the gnomes tell it; or was it some of the spirits of the wind that go everywhere and see everything? It might have been the same wind sprites that carry the seeds of the laurel and the pine so far up the mountain flanks. Or it might have been the dryads, those beautiful creatures of the wood the Greeks knew so much about. I tell you there are some mighty queer things going on in the plant world, and perhaps Bud was right! "Some peoples thinks they ain't no Fairies _now_, No more yet! But they _is_, I bet!" HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY