POISON-SUMACHS AND HARMLESS WOODBINE 95 



No account is here taken of the five-leaved because 

 it is not a sumach, and need not trouble us. With this 

 at one's tongue's end, no one need repeat the hazard- 

 ous exploit of two young ladies whom I know, one of 

 whom, as a committee on church decoration in a coun- 

 try town, brought her arms full of the scarlet autumn 

 branches of the venomous sumach ; while the other once 

 sent the writer a really beautiful group of carefully ar- 

 ranged rare grasses and mosses generously decked with 

 the white berries of the poison-ivy. Both of these rash 

 maidens, I believe, paid the severe penalty of their 

 botanical innocence. 



The harmless "Virginia-creeper" is occasionally a law 

 unto itself as to the number of leaflets, not contenting 

 itself with the five prescribed in its natural christening. 

 A correspondent recently sent me a dozen or more 

 leaves of this plant presenting the unusual multiplica- 

 tion of its leaflets to six, seven, eight, and even nine in 

 one instance, all of course springing from the central 

 common stem, as in the appended illustration of the 

 typical leaf, an innocent plant which every lover OT the 

 country should recognize as a friend rather than an 

 enemy. 



