STRATToxI SPRING WILD FLOWERS 



51 



water colors the flora about nie there and wherever thereafter I 

 mi^ht chance to be. 



All around the house were stately elms spreading their branches 

 with dignity graceful yet benignant over the mossy roofed old 

 buildings and standing as guard each side of a grassy lane leading 

 down to the west to the brook and meadow beyond the brook, the 

 elms barely giving way to the brook and rustic bridge over it and 

 beginning again with undisturbed statehness on the other side. 



Jean Paul says if you would be happy make a collection of some- 

 thing; but Solomons' supplement was found indispensible at the 

 outset in collecting and painting wild flowers. Solomon says 

 "The slothful man roast eth not that which he took in hunting, but 

 the substance of a diligent man is precious." 



It was not enough to hunt up and down that wild glen as I did 

 ever}^ day in the early spring, sometimes on one side of the roaring 

 brook sometimes on the other, crossing it on trees fallen across it 

 or stepping from stone to stone, a precarious footing, searching for 

 the first spring flowers. That which was caught in hunting must 

 be "roasted"; must be carried home unharmed, placed in water 

 and drawn and painted before it withered. In short the substance 

 must be taken precious care of with the utmost diligence or hunting 

 was of no use. Little or nothing was taken in April, however, 

 which was cold and stormy, though with newly aroused ardor the 

 hunting was carried on unweariedly. 



But one of the first days of May, growing near or partly in a 

 lingering snow bank, on the wooded hill east of the house between it 

 and the river the beautiful trailing Arbutus {Epigaea repens) was 

 discovered and with that my first campaign ' ' On the Trail of the 

 Wild Flowers" set merrily on. 



If you have never found the trailing arbutus growing in its own 

 wooded fastness in early spring, if you have never scraped among 

 the winter covering of dead leaves and seen the bunches of grateful 

 blossoms peeping up at you smiling and blushing in their virgin 

 beauty when there was scarcely another green not to say flowering 

 thing on the face of world round about, you have missed one of the 

 sweetest joys my memory cherishes. We used to clamber down a 

 steep bank above a river when small children and find such charm- 

 ing bunches of Mayflowers — no joy can ever be quite like that. 

 Never shall I forget the delight each cluster gave us, as we liberated 

 it from its covering of dead leaves — how it seemed to us as if the 



