8 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



rubber boots. They got ten dollars for the skin and 

 ten dollars for the bounty, and about one million 

 dollars' worth of glory. 



Hasting homeward for more peaceful adventures, 

 I find, near the road which leads to the railway 

 station over which scores and hundreds of my friends 

 and neighbors, including myself, pass every day, a 

 little patch of marshland. In the fall it is covered 

 with a thick growth of goldenrod, purple asters, 

 joe-pye-weed, wild sunflowers, white boneset, tear- 

 thumb, black bindweed, dodder, and a score or more 

 of other common fall flowers. 



One night, at nine o'clock, I noticed that an ice- 

 blue star shone from almost the very zenith of the 

 heavens. Below her were two faint stars making a 

 tiny triangle, the left-hand one showing as a beauti- 

 ful double under an opera-glass. Below was a row 

 of other dim points of light in the black sky. It was 

 Vega of the Lyre, the great Harp Star. Then I knew 

 that the time had come. We humans think, arro- 

 gantly, that we are the only ones for whom the stars 

 shine, and forget that flowers and birds, and all the 

 wild folk are born each under its own special star. 



The next morning I was up with the sun and 

 visited that bit of unpromising marshland past 

 which all of us had plodded year in and year out. 

 In one corner, through the dim grass, I found flaming 

 like deep-blue coals one of the most beautiful flowers 

 in the world, the fringed gentian. The stalk and 

 flower-stems looked like green candelabra, while the 



