THE EARLIEST FLOWERS. 123 
the list are wild oats (Oakesza sessilifolia, Watson) and 
fringed polygala and wake robin and anemone; and the 
list goes on lengthening as the spring fades into summer 
and summer declines into autumn, until with the bloom- 
ing of the witch hazel in the early October days I found 
that the delightful labor of that year was ended. There 
are two hundred and thirty-one names in the list. I had 
found not only these, most of which had been hitherto 
unnoticed, but with them a keener interest in the un- 
realized beauties of the world lying close to my feet and 
a deeper sense of the all-embracing mystery which sur- 
rounds our life. 
The next year I went over the same road and the 
list grew to three hundred and seventy-six, and with 
each succeeding year new names have been added till 
now it would not be difficult to find six hundred of them 
in the narrow round in which one can travel within three 
or four miles of home. When, years afterward, I read 
Jefferies’ “Field and Hedgerow,” and came upon that 
touching passage written in his fatal sickness, I think I 
could realize his yearning, by having a similar love. It 
is in the first paper, “‘Hours of Spring,” beautiful and 
yet so pathetic. 
“T wonder to myself how they can all get on with- 
out me—how they manage, bird and flower, without 
me to keep the calendar for them. For I noted it so 
carefully and lovingly, day by day, the seed-leaves on 
