CHAPTER III 
IN APRIL WEATHER 
There is no summer fulness in the winds,— 
Only the. dreamy stirring of the dawn,— 
When sweet, ecstatic spring awakes and finds 
The winter gone.—C. B. Going. 
IN earlier April the country is apt to look as if 
spring had ‘‘struck’’ it in patches. As the sub- 
urban resident rides from home to business through 
field, orchard, and woodland, he sees here a pasture 
as green as it will be in June, with a group of 
willows or poplars already burgeoned out into 
spring decorations; there a patch of the later forest 
trees, as unawakened as they were in midwinter. 
The first evidence of awakening life, given by 
the woods and copses, is the appearance of the 
blossoms on the boughs. The tender foliage does 
not issue, from the bud till later. For divers and 
sufficient reasons it is the habit of most trees to 
produce their flowers before their leaves, and the 
expanding buds of earliest spring are almost in- 
variably flower-buds. 
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