52 Musings by Camp-Fii^e and Wayside 



the delicious bounty. For richness and flavor the 

 whortleberry is second only to the strawberry, but 

 much of both is lost in transporting and marketing. 

 So nature utilizes this sand land for an abundance 

 of this nutritive and pleasant food. Not far away 

 is a moss-covered marsh, which one would think was 

 good for nothing but variety in the landscape, but 

 here is the home of the cranberries, much milder 

 and finer of flavor than those which are cultivated. 

 The marsh deepens into a shallow lake, the home of 

 the wild rice, which again has a flavor more pro- 

 nounced and pleasant than the rice of commerce. 

 The curculio made war on the wild plum and drove 

 it from the hills, but the plum took refuge by the 

 streams, where it could cast its larva-infected fruit 

 into the water and drown the pests, or upon water- 

 soaked soil, where they could not live. It must 

 have been a hard struggle for the plum to win foot- 

 ing against the vigorous swamp alder, but it suc- 

 ceeded, and in its season offers freely to all comers 

 its scarlet and delicious clusters. There is a cour- 

 tesy and a mutual helpfulness between those vari- 

 eties of plants whose wants are so different that 

 they do not have to struggle for the occupancy of 

 the same soil. The whortleberry goes with the 

 pines, because the pines preserve the snow till late 

 in the spring, and the snow prevents the plants 

 from blooming until danger of frost is past. The 

 pines serve the cranberry also, but in a different 

 way. The slowly melting snow keeps the marsh 



