It was as if giants, playing battledore, had driven a hundred green shuttlecocks to land in the woodcock-haunted shelter. The tangle of their fronds was chin high and you smashed your way through their woody stipes with difficulty, so strong and thick were they. Now they have vanished and scarcely a trace of their presence remains. Brown and brittle stalks rise a little from the earth here and there, and if you search among fallen leaves you may find the ends of their rootstalks with the growth for next year coiled in compact bundles there, ready to unfold. From these rootstalks spring in all directions slender underground runners whence will grow new plants. But none of this is visible. The only reminder of that once luxurious thicket is the brittle, brown stalks that still, here and there, protrude from the fallen leaves. It is difficult to see where they all went, but there is something savoring of the supernatural about ferns, anyway. Shakspeare says: “We have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible.” For men to use this receipt the seed must be garnered on St. John’s eve in a white napkin with such and such incantations properly recited. The _Struthiopteris germanica_ had plenty of fern-seed on St. John’s eve. It must have used the old-time incantations with success, for all the giant shuttlecocks that thronged the swale with a close-set tangle of feathery green have vanished. I sought another moist and shady woodland where all the early spring the ground was a warm pinky brown with the fuzz of uncurling fiddle heads, and later the brown, leaf-carpeted earth was hidden in a delicate lace patterned of the young fronds of the cinnamon and the interrupted fern. To this woodland came the yellow-warblers for the soft fuzz for use in nest building, it compacting readily into a felt-like mass that is at once yielding and durable. The cinnamon fern when it has reached any size has an underground stump that is as woody and tough almost as that of a tree. Its strong fronds are next to those of the ostrich-fern in the woody vigor of their stipes. Surely these might have lasted. Yet not one form of fern life was visible in this once thronged wood. Like the ostrich ferns they had poured their own fern-seed on their heads and whispered the correct incantation at the coming of the first chill wind. I am inclined to think it all happened in a jiffy, when happen it did, for I have been back and forth through that part of the wood all the fall and I cannot recall the day on which they were first missing. It seems as if I would have noticed their gradual crumbling and decay.