BY THE EIVERSIDE. 107 



at once. All our trees that are not evergreens 

 make preparations for the new leaves, in buds 

 stored with food, and often varnished over, 

 as if each one was an object of special provi- 

 dence. Our mayflowers, or trailing arbutus, 

 produce the flower buds in the autumn, and 

 sometimes these preparations for the next spring 

 are pushed too far by favoring weather; and 

 then one finds here and there a fall blossom, 

 born out of due season, instead of being tucked 

 up under a snow blanket in a sound sleep of 

 months. 



This witch-hazel with us never grows to more 

 than ten feet in height, but in the Southern 

 States it is much taller. It is an old belief 

 that rods of hazel had magic powers, and so far 

 is this from being outgrown that I have seen a 

 sane practical farmer searching for gold mines 

 by the aid of a hazel crotch, and he called it a 

 "mineral rod." What the rod did not do in 

 the way of " drawing " his imagination helped 

 out. He never found a mine with its aid, but 

 he did not lose confidence in the stick to do 

 that would l>e to drop a superstition, and that 

 kind of a devil does not quit short of " fasting 

 and prayer." So far as we know, this belief is 

 of the remotest antiquity. 



The earliest written history of Greeks, Romans, 



