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trunks, in thickets and moist meadows. The poision-sumach is a 
near relation to the poision-ivy. It has beautiful rose-purple leaf- 
stalks. Some persons gather the flowers and foliage of both plants 
with impunity, while others are badly poisoned by them. Some- 
times children who are ignorant of the effects of some poisonous 
plants, induced by the peculiar feeling they experience upon 
munching the foliage, enjoy games in which the object is to see 
who can longest endure the discomfort. There are some plants 
poisonous to the stomach. Such plants, as fool's parsley, and 
poison-hemlock, have sickened and killed children, who have 
eaten their roots, supposing them to be ‘‘sweet cicely”’ or the like. 
Cattle turned out to pasture in the spring, after being shut up 
all winter, are liable to eat this plant, and to be seriously injured 
or even killed by it. As most young children love to gather wild 
flowers, they should always be cautioned never to taste or handle 
any flowers with which they are not perfectly familiar. Mother 
nature warns us against these poisonous plants, in her own way, 
for they are generally biting, acrid or nauseous to our palates. 
After realizing the wonderful life of the wild flowers—and their 
actions certainly are wonderfully like those of the conscious think- 
a mystery asever. Those who try to define it only give it a new 
name. Are we going to neglect our wild flowers, and allow them 
to be exterminated before we discover God's secrets in their 
creation? No, we must preserve our wild flowers. 
It is late on an autumnafternoon. An old gray-haired lady is 
reposing in a big arm chair before an open window. She is 
gazing far out upon the open meadow, to the woods beyond. 
How inviting the trees and flowers look to her with their bril- 
liantly colored robes. She is dreaming of the happy days of 
youth in that far-away time, when she too could go out into the 
forests and live with the wild flowers. She drops her eyes, and 
her glance falls upon a vase of fringed gentians, resting on 4 
nearby table, the last message from the woods before the long 
sleep. She reaches for them, and as she draws them to her she 
singles out the most beautiful, at the same moment a lone tear 
