A FAVORITE ROUND 21 



Raspberries and thimbleberries are getting 

 ripe (they do not need to be " dead ripe," 

 thimbleberries especially, for an old country 

 boy), and meadow-sweet and mullein are in 

 bloom. Hardhack, standing near them, has 

 not begun to show the pink. 



Now I turn the corner, leaving the farms 

 behind, and as I do so I bethink myself of a 

 bed of yellow galium just beyond. It ought 

 to be in blossom. And so it is the pret- 

 tiest sight of the morning, and of many morn- 

 ings. I stand beside it, admiring its beauty 

 and inhaling its faint, wholesomely sweet 

 odor. Bedstraw, it is called. If it will keep 

 that fragrance, why should mattresses ever 

 be filled with anything else? This is the 

 only patch of the kind that I know, and 

 I felicitate myself upon having happened 

 along at just the right minute to see it in 

 all its sweetness and beauty. Year after 

 year it blooms here on this roadside, and 

 nowhere else ; millions of tiny flowers of a 

 really exquisite color, yellow with much of 

 green in it, a shade for which in my igno- 

 rance I have no name. 



The road soon runs into a swamp, and I 



