and little streams feed the feeders. If you made a map of the Mississippi river and all it feeders, it would look like an oak tree with no leaves on it.
Don't you want to follow a brook that flows into a river, and find out where it came from? It's a long walk, and up hill all the way. Make up a bouquet of flowers as you go. If you had a boat you could get some water lilies here, or with rubber boots for wading, some purple water flags. There are some pussy willows. How thick and green things grow, on the low river bank. And how soft and black the soil is. Where it is a little higher and dryer, you can pick ferns and buttercups. Higher still, in the maple woods along the brook, you may find violets. On that high, gravelly bank are tall, weedy looking plants. In the fall, if you come here again, you will find golden-rod and purple asters. The brook is getting narrower and shallower, but it runs faster. There it is almost hidden by hazel brush. See that squirrel? He knows there will be nuts here, and acorns in that oak tree he is running up. The brook is only a thread of water, now, but running very fast between banks of scanty grass. There is some ground pine and pink laurel, and dry gray lichens on the rocks, among scattered pine trees.
Why there is a bunch of ferns and a cushion of velvet moss! Part the ferns with your fingers, and find sparkling water gushing out of a little nest of wet rocks. This is a spring. It is the birth place of the brook. These are the only ferns you found up so high. Ferns love water and soft soil. The spring gives them the food they want.
It seems perfectly flat here. You can look over a high, wide country. Here is another spring. But the brook it makes flows the other way! Then, of course, the land must slope the other way, too. We are on a ridge of land, or divide. Sometimes a divide is called a watershed. It is like the roof of a house. The water flows down each side of a roof to the water troughs under the eaves. The rain washes the roof clean, doesn't it? Well, the little streams wash the land slopes clean. First, they soften the ground they flow over and make mud. The mud mixes
