AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 71 



fhe eagle is a bird of large ideas, he embraces long 

 distances ; tbe continent is his home. I never look 

 upon one without emotion ; I follow him with my eye 

 as long as I can. I think of Canada, of the Great 

 Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains, of the wild and 

 sounding sea-coast. The waters are his, and the 

 woods and the inaccessible cliffs. He pierces behind 

 the veil of the storm, and his joy is height and depth 

 and vast spaces. 



We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in 

 the edge of the woods, and are lucky to find a single 

 scarlet lobelia lingering there. It seems almost to 

 light up the gloom with its intense bit of color. Be- 

 side a ditch in a field beyond we find the great blue 

 lobelia (Lobelia syphiliticd), and near it amid the 

 weeds and wild grasses and purple asters the most 

 beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed gentian. 

 What a rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the 

 gentian has amid its coarse, unkempt surroundings. 

 It does not lure the bee but it lures and holds every 

 passing human eye. If we strike through the corner 

 of yonder woods, where the ground is moistened by 

 hidden springs and where there is a little opening 

 amid the trees, we shall find the closed gentian, a 

 rare flower in this locality. I had walked this way 

 many times before I chanced upon its retreat; and 

 then I was following a line of bees. I lost the bees 

 but I got the gentians. How curiously this flower 

 looks with its deep blue petals folded together so 

 *ightly a bud^ and yet a blo&som. It is the nun 



