164 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA 



With all the rest there was no passing the 

 strangely blue bear-plums, as Northern peo- 

 ple call the fruit of clintonia. A strange 

 blue, I say. Left to myself I should never 

 have found a word for it ; but by good luck 

 I raised the question with a man who, as I 

 now suppose, is probably the only person in 

 the world who could have told me what I 

 needed to know. He is an authority upon 

 pottery and porcelain, and he answered on 

 the instant, though I cannot hope to quote 

 him exactly, that the color was that of the 

 Ming dynasty. Every Chinese dynasty, I 

 think he said, has a color of its own for its 

 pottery. When the founder of the Ming 

 dynasty was asked of what shade he would 

 have the royal dinner set, he replied : " Let 

 it be that of the sky after rain." And so 

 it was the color of Franconia bear-plums. 

 Which strikes me as a circumstance very 

 much to the Ming dynasty's credit. 



In a lonely stretch of the road, with a cat- 

 tle pasture on one side and a wood on the 

 other, where tall grass in full flower stood 

 between the horse track and the wheel rut 

 (this was a good berrying place, also, had I 



