CHAPTER III 

 IN APRIL WEATHER 



There is no summer fulness in the winds, 



Only the dreamy stirring of the dawn, 

 When sweet, ecstatic spring awakes and finds 

 The winter gone. C. B. Going. 



IN earlier April the country is apt to look as if 

 spring had " struck" it in patches. As the sub- 

 urban resident rides from home to business through 

 field, orchard, and woodland, he sees here a pasture 

 as green as it will be in June, with a group of 

 willows or poplars already burgeoned out into 

 spring decorations; there a patch of the later forest 

 trees, as unawakened as they were in midwinter. 



The first evidence of awakening life, given by 

 the woods and copses, is the appearance of the 

 blossoms on the boughs. The tender foliage does 

 not issue from the bud till later. For divers and 

 sufficient reasons it is the habit of most trees to 

 produce their flowers before their leaves, and the 

 expanding buds of earliest spring are almost in- 

 variably flower-buds. 



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