AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE 59 



emotion; I follow him with my eye as long as I 

 can. I think of Canada, of the Great Lakes, of 

 the Eocky Mountains, of the wild and sounding 

 seacoast. 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 al- 

 most to light up the gloom with its intense bit of 

 color. Beside a ditch in a field beyond, we find the 

 great blue lobelia, 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 cor- 

 ner of yonder woods, where the ground is moistened 

 by hidden springs, and where there is a little open- 

 ing 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 curious this 

 flower looks with its deep blue petals folded together 

 so tightly, — a bud and yet a blossom ! It is the 

 nun among our wild flowers, — a form closely veiled 

 and cloaked. The buccaneer bumblebee sometimes 

 tries to rifle it of its sweets. I have seen the bios- 



