WEEDS ABOVE THE SNOW 305 



of goldenrod, the dried flower-cups like rayed pin- 

 heads ; with what, tool did the etcher make so many 

 perfect, star-edged dots? The Queen Anne's lace 

 has half closed its cup& — cups of open ribs and 

 diaphanous rim, which hold each its little dab of 

 snow. Amid them all are many grasses, fairy- 

 plumes of such delicacy that the artist's needle 

 must merely have breathed against the blackened 

 plate. A mullein stalk by the fence is a gaudy thing, 

 a big, grandiloquent straight line, borne down 

 heavily upon for the sake of contrast. But beside 

 it, and quite as tall, a milkweed is bursting open 

 its pods like gray and ocher orchids, and a tall wild 

 lettuce, ugliest of weeds (always excepting the bur- 

 dock) in summer, is now a slender spire, flowering 

 at its peak into a hundred feathery little rosettes. 

 To one who loves pure line and pattern this small 

 garden of weed-tops above the snow by the pasture 

 fence — even the fence-posts go marching along, 

 stroke, stroke, stroke of black across the snow, in 

 a quaint procession — could be a source of almost 

 endless study and delight. 



But again I lift my eyes. Just across the road 

 is a row of fine old sugar-maples which have not 

 yet succumbed to the brutally unintelligent prun- 

 ing of the State Highway Commission. Now, more 

 than ever, I am aware how, fifteen feet from the 

 ground, they begin to burst into a great fountain- 

 spray of branches, each branch bursting and re- 

 bursting on its upward spring, till the whole grace- 

 fully domed crown dissolves in a riot of twigs, and 

 against the hard winter sky it is almost impossible 

 to tell exactly the point at which the last buds end. 



