30 THE OAK. 



or flower, which, holding up its finger, as it were, 

 and beckoning, has allured them into one of those 

 sweet side-chapels of the great cathedral, which, 

 when a man has once entered, he never desires to 

 leave. There was a fable in olden time of a coun- 

 try in which grew lotus-trees. When travellers 

 entered that country, and tasted of the fruit, they 

 were overpowered with an indefinable and delicious 

 longing to remain there always, not necessarily to 

 be always eating lotus, but to enjoy the heavenly 

 climate and atmosphere which produced it. That 

 country, with its lotus-trees, has not been blotted 

 out. The -fable, like every other true one, is for all 

 time. Living nature, everywhere round about us, 

 is the country of the lotus, and the fruit is the 

 serene and innocent delight, with innumerable 

 sweet teachings for our intelligence, which comes 

 of our looking at it reverently and lovingly. The 

 beckoning thus given is always remembered with 

 pleasure. Fries, the eminent German writer upon 

 fungi, tells us he was attracted to the study of that 

 class of plants, by the lustre of the crimson Dryads* 

 cup, by botanists called Peziza coccinea, which in 

 the earliest days of spring appears on dead branches 

 in damp woods and groves, and resembles an acorn- 

 chamber of coral-red. No slight pleasure is it to 

 another botanist, albeit a mere stripling by the side 

 of Fries, to view, over again and yet once more, 

 year by year, in forest glades, where the trees are 



