70 March Water-Ranunculus. 



wonderingly to the giver and said, ' Is it summer now, 

 dear mother?' He, poor fellow, had missed his spring 

 altogether, and missed it doubly ; for the spring of his 

 life was passed on a couch of suffering, amidst odors 

 of medicines, visits of grave-faced doctors, and a weari- 

 ness almost without hope. 



Happier in this, at least, at the Val Ste. Veronique 

 we were out every day from the very beginning of the 

 new season, and watched the slow brightening of it like 

 a dawn. Where, in early March, will you find a plant 

 already in the fullest pride of all its greenery, not yet in 

 flower it is true, but in leaf abundantly ? The water 

 precedes the land in the contest for spring primers, and 

 our finest streams are full of the water-ranunculus, 

 waving in the shallows like long green hair, the richest 

 of all greens, certainly, though it might be treason to 

 some paler and fairer land plants to affirm that it is also 

 the loveliest. The water at this time is quite clear and 

 abundant, and very swift in those depths of two or three 

 feet where the ranunculus is happiest ; so that all the 

 fine linear segments of its subaqueous leaves, the only 

 ones yet developed, are washed by millions of gallons of 

 pure water every day of their lives, and kept so exqui- 

 sitely clean that no fragment of earth can ever adhere 

 to them for an instant. It is very different later in the 

 year, as we shall see when the time comes, but the plant 

 is never so lovely as it is now, even when its flowers are 

 all out in the sunshine and it has two sorts of leaves to 

 boast of. I thought sometimes as I watched it waving 

 so unweariedly with the motion that the current gave it, 



