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of a carpet of arbutus, we shall find patches of it 

 only, hidden away under the fallen leaves of the 

 Elysian groves. For we shall need to get out of even 

 the celestial city into the open fields and woods, 

 and I can think of nothing so likely to draw us away 

 from our mansions and beyond the pearly gates as 

 the chance to go "May-flowering." 



And, even here below, among the unransomed 

 souls of Boston, when Mayflower-time arrives, you 

 may see young men and maidens, children and 

 grandfathers, trooping out to the woods for a hand- 

 ful of the flowers. And up from the Cape, to those 

 who cannot go into the woods, the flowers, them- 

 selves, come, tight, naked bunches, stripped of all 

 but the pink of their faces and the sweet of their 

 souls. They possess every quarter of the city. Jew 

 and Gentile sell them, Greek and Barbarian buy 

 them, as they buy and sell no other wild flower. 



Why, then, is it not the arbutus, instead of the 

 shad-bush, that spells for me the spring ? I don't 

 know ; unless it is because the shad-bush takes 

 deeper hold upon my imagination. It certainly is 

 not its form, or color, or fragrance, though it has 

 grace, an airy, misty, half-substantial shape, a 



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