She Bay of the Band 
of a carpet of arbutus, we shall find patches of it 
only, hidden away under the fallen leaves of the 
Elysian groves. For we shall need to get out of even 
the celestial city into the open fields and woods, 
and I can think of nothing so likely to draw us away 
from our mansions and beyond the pearly gates as 
the chance to go “ May-flowering.” 
And, even here below, among the unransomed 
souls of Boston, when Mayflower-time arrives, you 
may see young men and maidens, children and 
grandfathers, trooping out to the woods for a hand- 
ful of the flowers. And up from the Cape, to those 
who cannot go into the woods, the flowers, them- 
selves, come, — tight, naked bunches, stripped of all 
but the pink of their faces and the sweet of their 
souls, They possess every quarter of the city. Jew 
and Gentile sell them, Greek and Barbarian buy 
them, as they buy and sell no other wild flower. 
Why, then, is it not the arbutus, instead of the 
shad-bush, that spells for me the spring? I don’t 
know; unless it is because the shad-bush takes 
deeper hold upon my imagination. It certainly is 
not its form, or color, or fragrance, —though it has 
grace,—an airy, misty, half-substantial shape, a 
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