mistake. Many flowers and leaves close at _night_ and open in the
_day-time_, but very few indeed exhibit the peculiar action of the
sensitive plant in this respect. That plant will open at night if you
bring a bright light into the room where it is growing, and it will
close its leaves if the room is made dark in the day-time.

Other plants take note of times and seasons. The sensitive plant obeys
no regular rules of this kind, but acts according to circumstances.

When I was a boy, I often used to go to a green-house where there were
a great many beautiful and rare plants; but I always thought that the
sensitive plant was the most wonderful thing in the whole
collection, and I did not know then how susceptible it was to the
influence of light. I was interested in it simply because it seemed to
have a sort of vegetable reason, and understood that it should shut up
its leaves whenever I touched it.

[Illustration: THE SENSITIVE PLANT.]

But there were things around me in the vegetable kingdom which were
still more wonderful than that, and I took no notice of them at all.

In the garden and around the house, growing everywhere, in the most
common and ordinary places, were vines of various kinds--I think there
were more morning-glories than anything else--and these exhibited a
great deal more sense, and a much nearer approach to reasoning powers,
than the sensitive plants, which were so carefully kept in the
green-house.

When one of these vines came up out of the earth, fresh from its seed,