I GO TO THE COUNTRY 5 



mother, we had watched the spikes unfold until 

 they looked like little green and purple hoods. In- 

 side each one there stands a piece like a stick with 

 hundreds of tiny florets growing about its sides. 

 The hoods, Tommy says, are just to protect these 

 florets from cold and wind. He laughed when 

 I picked one of them, and then threw it down 

 because it smelled like a mustard-plaster. 



" There'll soon be other flowers much better 

 than that to pick," he said, " only by the time 

 they're here Skunk Cabbage will have lost its 

 hoods, and its great green leaves will begin to make 

 this swamp look like a cabbage-patch." 



Each day in the country now there are so many 

 surprises that It seems quite as though we had 

 come to live in fairy land, only things don't van- 

 ish here when we awake in the morning. Every- 

 thing is real. 



At last there is one beautiful little flower above 

 the ground. This morning Tommy took me out 

 to look for it. Its name is Hepatica, or some- 

 times he calls it Blue Eyes. He had picked four 

 white, three blue, and a pink one before I had 

 found any. His eyes are sharp. But when I 

 pushed aside some dried leaves with a stick I also 

 spied a few, full open and blinking In the sun- 

 shine. The Hepaticas are such dear little flowers. 

 They grow in groups together and don't seem to 

 mind having no other playmates than dead leaves. 

 I wondered If they felt something as I did when 



