APRIL DAYS 67 
our indigenous flowers; the children instinc- 
tively recognize this, and are apt to omit them 
when gathering the more delicate native blos- 
soms of the woods. 
There is something touching in the gradual 
retirement before civilization of these fragile 
aborigines. They do not wait for the actual 
brute contact of red bricks and curbstones, but 
they feel the danger miles away. The Indians 
called the low plantain “the white man’s foot- 
step ;” and these shy creatures gradually disap- 
pear the moment the red man gets beyond 
hearing. Bigelow’s delightful book, “Florula 
Bostoniensis,” is becoming a series of epitaphs. 
Too well we know it,—those of us who in 
happy Cambridge childhood often gathered, 
almost within a stone’s-throw of Professor Agas- 
siz’s museum, the arethusa and the gentian, 
the cardinal flower and the gaudy rhexia, — we 
who remember the last secret hiding-place of 
the rhodora in West Cambridge, of the yellow 
violet and the Viola debilis in Watertown, of 
the Convallaria trifolia near Fresh Pond, of the 
Hottonia beyond Wellington’s Hill, of the Cor 
nus florida in West Roxbury, of the Clintonia 
and the dwarf ginseng in Brookline, — we who 
have found in its one chosen nook the sacred 
Andromeda polifolia of Linnzeus. Now van- 
ished almost or wholly from city suburbs, these 
