"In ten minutes they had begun to curve themselves in that direction and acted exactly as you might fancy a very slow snake would do if he wished to reach anything. The upper tendrils bent down, and the side ones curved themselves until they touched the pole, and in a few hours were twisted quite round it.
"It was on the side away from the light, and, excepting the faculty of sight, we can think of no other means by which the tendrils could be aware that the pole had been placed there. They had to turn away from the light to reach it, and they set themselves in motion visibly within a few minutes of the pole's being there."
My own experience with climbing plants has long since convinced me that they have "a will of their own," and that if their will differs from my own no amount of coaxing will induce them to take the path which is laid out for them.
Well, if plants had but tongues they could, no doubt, tell us things well worth hearing in regard to their special mode of existence.
It seems but yesterday that the punctual year brought back her Daffodils--that Hyacinth and Tulip pushed up green shoots for the spring sunshine--and now the Syringa bushes are white with bloom.
In one short week midsummer will have come, that beautiful holiday of the summer solstice, whose festal observance is, in England, of great antiquity.
The old practice of lighting bonfires in London and in other towns (and even in villages) is probably a remnant of the pagan rites once observed on that day.
Later, the Christian monks dedicated this festival to one of their saints, and, accordingly, the people on that day made their houses gay with St. John's-wort and other flowers and at evening kept the "vigil of St. John the Baptist," lighting bonfires in honor of this saint. Every man's door was then hung with birch boughs and lamps of glass, whose oil burnt on through the night. An old parish entry--dating so far back as the reign of Edward IVth--thus stands: "For birch at Midsummer VIII d"; and again, "Various payments for birch bowes at Midsummer."
Old English poets commemorate in verse the hanging at this season of birch branches over the sign boards of shop doors.
Perhaps in our increasing demand for holidays we may yet adopt this charming festival of our English forbears, as we have that of their Yule-tide. It would fall at the same season as did that pretty Persian festival, "The Feast of Roses."