A SHARP LOOKOUT 



or climbing stem, its glossy, deep-green, 

 heart-shaped leaves, its clustering umbels 

 of small greenish-yellow flowers, making it 

 very pleasing to the eye ; but to examine it 

 closely one must positively hold his nose. 

 It would be too cruel a joke to offer it to 

 any person not acquainted with it to smell. 

 It is like the vent of a charnel-house. It is 

 first cousin to the trilliums, among the pret- 

 tiest of our native wild flowers, and the 

 same bad blood crops out in the purple tril- 

 lium or birthroot. 



Nature will include the disagreeable and 

 repulsive also. I have seen the phallic 

 fungus growing in June under a rosebush. 

 There was the rose, and beneath it, spring- 

 ing from the same mould, was this diabolical 

 offering to Priapus. With the perfume of 

 the roses into the open window came the 

 stench of this hideous parody, as if in mock- 

 ery. I removed it, and another appeared 

 in the same place shortly afterward. The 

 earthman was rampant and insulting. Pan 

 is not dead yet. At least he still makes a 

 ghastly sign here and there in nature. 



The good observer of nature exists in 

 fragments, a trait here and a trait there. 

 Each person sees what it concerns him to 

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