95 



root, but there comes not leaf or bud to 

 those that the love-vine gilded. 



All the marsh-land is sweet with pinky- 

 pale swamp-roses. There, too, the big green 

 brake grows waist-high, and smaller ferns tan- 

 gle in the shady tree-set places. The earthy 

 banks wave to you long sprays of Solomon's 

 seal. Pink-root uplifts to sunshine its scar- 

 let, gold-lined trumpets, as gorgeous almost 

 as the cardinal-flower, whose scarlet torch 

 outflames the glow of August. 



Often, too, the old field holds sweetbrier, 

 the poet's eglantine. It is a strangely hu- 

 man flower even here where Nature is so 

 rapidly reclaiming her lost domain. It loves 

 a rich root-hold ; if warm and stony, all the 

 better. Oftener than not it is the living, 

 the only epitaph of a forgotten home. Vivid 

 hedge -rose clusters, pink as the heavens 

 at dawn, put to shame its scant bestarment 

 of pale, small, single blossoms ; yet are 

 themselves more shamed by the exquisite 

 sylvan fragrance of the sweetbrier's green 

 leaves. 



Upland, on the gulleyed hill-sides, "but- 

 terfly-weed " glows in summer sunshine like 

 unto hanclfuls of yellow-scarlet flame amid 

 a sea of feathery sedge. Broom-sedge the 

 country folk call it, or sometimes " broom- 



