The Brook I Found When on the Trail of the Wild 



Flowers 



Lucy L. Stratton 

 Erie, Pa. 



Y reminiscences of that first spring of 

 wild flower hunting are tinged with a 

 very tender affection for that Brook, 

 indeed we became fast friends for life, 

 for to fancy the brook not requiting 

 my love were impossible. Once to be 

 sure — but that was not the fault of 

 the brook- — if on one occasion I lost 

 my poise and fell in heels over head 

 till my nose touched the sandy bottom, it just smiled a sunny 

 smile, knowing I was not harmed, and turning and looking back 

 from a big rock it met just below, it said laughing out loud but 

 kindly — "Good for you!" The brook was not so very young even 

 at the top of the wild glen where it jumped over rocks and frisked 

 like a wild school boy — it was born some three or four miles away, 

 was of noble birth, its mother a very well-bred lake, a fair sheet 

 I know not how large, surrounded by green meadows and fringed 

 with willows. She would have been surprised me thinks, that 

 staid and placid mother, to have seen the mad antics of her offspring 

 when it encountered that steep and rocky ravine. But nothing 

 could be lovlier than its conduct in the many little grottos it found 

 on its way through the meadows. How still it kept to let the 

 pretty white stemmed birches whose branches arched above it and 

 the ferns that drooped till they touched the water see themselves 

 in its golden mirror ! How tenderly it returned the greeting of the 

 blue forget-me-nots on its banks bending down for a kiss ! But for 

 capriciousness there never was anything like it. In two minutes 

 after dreaming so pensively and making love so sweetly in those 

 sunfiecked grottos we would see it tearing away again in the wildest 

 kind of a frolic, running around rocks or leaping over them, elbow- 

 ing saucily the big plants aside or dashing water all over them and 

 so plunge along till it was tired and then another grotto — but 

 never two in the least alike — always a new picture, one more lovely 

 than another. 



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