8 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
rubber boots. They got ten dollars for the skin and 
ten dollars for the bounty, and about one million 
dollars’ worth of glory. 
Hasting homeward for more peaceful adventures, 
I find, near the road which leads to the railway 
station over which scores and hundreds of my friends 
and neighbors, including myself, pass every day, a 
little patch of marshland. In the fall it is covered 
with a thick growth of goldenrod, purple asters, 
joe-pye-weed, wild sunflowers, white boneset, tear- 
thumb, black bindweed, dodder, and a score or more 
of other common fall flowers. 
One night, at nine o’clock, I noticed that an ice- 
blue star shone from almost the very zenith of the 
heavens. Below her were two faint stars making a 
tiny triangle, the left-hand one showing as a beauti- 
ful double under an opera-glass. Below was a row 
of other dim points of light in the black sky. It was 
Vega of the Lyre, the great Harp Star. Then I knew 
that the time had come. We humans think, arro- 
gantly, that we are the only ones for whom the stars 
shine, and forget that flowers and birds, and all the 
wild folk are born each under its own special star. 
The next morning I was up with the sun and 
visited that bit of unpromising marshland past 
which all of us had plodded year in and year out. 
In one corner, through the dim grass, I found flaming 
like deep-blue coals one of the most beautiful flowers 
in the world, the fringed gentian. The stalk and 
flower-stems looked like green candelabra, while the 
