50 BEES. 
hear the low hum of his plumage, as if the web of 
every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong, 
level flight. I watched him as long as my eye 
could hold him. When he was fairly clear of the 
mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement in 
which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went with- 
out once breaking his majestic poise till he appeared 
to sight some far-off alien geography, when he 
bent his course thitherward and gradually vanished 
in the blue depths. The eagle is a bird of large 
ideas, he embraces long distances; the continent is 
his home. I never look upon one without emotion ; 
I follow him with my eye as long as I can. I 
think of Canada, of the Great Lakes, of the Rocky 
Mountains, of the wild and sounding sea-coast. 
The waters are his, and the woods and the inacces- 
sible cliffs. He pierces behind the veil of the storm, 
and his joy is height and depth and vast spaces. 
We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in 
the edge of the woods, and are lucky to find a single 
scarlet lobelia lingering there. It seems almost to 
light up the gloom with its intense bit of color. Be- 
side a ditch in a field beyond we find the great blue 
lobelia (Lobelia syphilitica), and near it amid the 
weeds and wild grasses and purple asters the most 
beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed gentian. 
What a rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the 
gentian has amid its coarse, unkempt surroundings. 
It does not lure the bee, but it lures and holds every 
passing human eye. If we strike through the corner 
of yonder woods, where the ground is moistened by 
hidden springs and where there is a little opening 
amid the trees, we shall find the closed gentian, a 
rare flower in this locality. I had walked this way 
