MARCH. 127 



It was a gladsome morning, such as that " queen of the 

 waters," our iVymphae^a odorata, which we delight to call by 

 way of preeminence, the Pond Lily^ loves to greet, with its 

 fairest outspread snowy petals as they expand to the bright 

 rays of the sun. There they were floating, those lihes, in 

 regal placidness on the scarcely moving current of the stream, 

 over which we took our way to leave behind us the dusty 

 road and the busier haunts of men. Their beauty and love- 

 liness did not make us oblivious, however, to whatever else 

 grew beside the very road, though never so homely in attire 

 or besoiled and dust-covered, they might be. The eye that 

 is patient, curious and on the alert to mark all that lies around 

 its range of vision, can always find subjects enough for its 

 study and contemplation. It may be now an oak, roughly 

 scored by the furrowing lines of Time upon its brave and 

 hardy bole, and all the more richly green in its smoothed and 

 shining foliage. It may be, anon, the earliest golden rod or 

 the first flowering aster, foretelling by their lustrous wand, or 

 by their meek azure starry eyes, the coming autumn and the 

 approaching end of the year. Hardy, yet mysteriously in- 

 teresting, those autumnal flowers which are termed Synge- 

 nesious, whose puzzling forms make them the more attractive 

 and worthier our search ! 



They symbolize too the richness of Nature — not delicately 

 ornate in rosy and paly purple, or even luxuriously gorgeous 

 in crimson and scarlet hues — but of more solid types, of gold 

 and silver, or of azure and cerulean, like the very sky ! The 

 autumnal Apargia glittering all over the fields, to remind us 

 again of that vernal, welcome guest the Leontodon ; the one 

 the dandelion of spring — the other the sister cospecies of the 

 fading year ! The golden rods, of every contour of elegance, 

 in thyrse or spike, or fastigiate or plumy or pendent or stifl^'y 

 erect : all glowing in richest gold : some so tall as to wave 

 majestically above us — and others so curt and small as to 

 claim our obeisance to them. We are so accustomed to see 

 them year after year that we soon learn to little heed them, 

 and they become only coarse weeds — alas ! for utilitarian no- 

 tions of our Saxon prejudices — alas ! for a want of a more 



