WEEDS ABOVE THE SNOW 305 



of goldenrod, the dried flower- cups like rayed pin- 

 heads ; with what tool did the etcher make so many 

 perfect, star-edged dots? The Queen Anne's lace 

 has half closed its cups cups of open ribs and 

 diaphanous rim, which hold each its little dab of 

 snow. Amid them all are many grasses, fairy 

 plumes of such delicacy that the artist's needle 

 must merely have breathed against the blackened 

 plate. A mullein stalk by the fence is a gaudy thing, 

 a big, grandiloquent straight line, borne down 

 heavily upon for the sake of contrast. But beside 

 it, and quite as tall, a milkweed is bursting open 

 its pods like gray and ocher orchids, and a tall wild 

 lettuce, ugliest of weeds (always excepting the bur- 

 dock) in summer, is now a slender spire, flowering 

 at its peak into a hundred feathery little rosettes. 

 To one who loves pure line and pattern this small 

 garden of weed-tops above the snow by the pasture 

 fence even the fence-posts go marching along, 

 stroke, stroke, stroke of black across the snow, in 

 a quaint procession could be a source of almost 

 endless study and delight. 



But again I lift my eyes. Just across the road 

 is a row of fine old sugar-maples which have not 

 yet succumbed to the brutally unintelligent prun- 

 ing of the State Highway Commission. Now, more 

 than ever, I am aware how, fifteen feet from the 

 ground, they begin to burst into a great fountain- 

 spray of branches, each branch bursting and re- 

 bursting on its upward spring, till the whole grace- 

 fully domed crown dissolves in a riot of twigs, and 

 against the hard winter sky it is almost impossible 

 to tell exactly the point at which the last buds end. 



