32 LAND OF THE LINGERING SNOW. 



a golden crocus bud before leaving the city, but 

 it was under the shelter of a well-warmed, south- 

 facing house, and had been covered with a 

 straw blanket all winter. This flower of the 

 swamp had taken care of itself on the edge of a 

 cold spring filled with bright green watercress. 

 It had no warm wall to shelter it, no blanket 

 save the black mud. It was as large as a tulip, 

 and its spots and stripes of purple and greenish 

 yellow made it quite conspicuous in its meadow 

 bed. Pulling open the fleshy lips of its highly 

 scented spathe, its yellow pollen was scattered 

 in all directions. The name of this odoriferous 

 flower of early spring is symplocctrpus fcetidus. 

 Passing through the ancient oaks I heard birds 

 singing in a stubble field beyond. The oaks are 

 the finest trees I have ever seen "outside of the 

 primeval forests of the North. One of them 

 not the largest or oldest measured twenty feet 

 around its trunk at a height of three feet from 

 the turf. There are in all nearly thirty of these 

 magnificent trees, whose age, if John Evelyn is 

 a good authority for the age of oaks, is prob- 

 ably to be reckoned by centuries. The glacial 

 kame from which these trees spring, old as it is, 

 bears on its face the record of change and of 

 the woes of nature ; but the oaks, having out- 

 lived generations of other trees, seem like moun- 

 tain-crests, stable and enduring. The birds in 



