Martinmas Summer 381 
mental and spiritual loneliness, foresaw the coming 
of fuller life, light, and liberty. 
How many there have been! From heavenly- 
minded Job, harshly criticised by his more material 
companions in the dawn of time, to Savonarola 
and Latimer, Columbus and Galileo, Andreas 
Hofer and John Brown, and thence on, through 
the years, to the ‘‘crank’’ or ‘‘ dreamer’’ or ‘‘ un- 
” 
practical sentimentalist ’’ who is the newspaper butt 
of our own day. But they have all been, like the 
Sommer Gowk, prophets of the spring. 
The same Indian-summer weather which throws 
the violets out of their reckoning brings into bloom 
our very last wild flower, the witch- or wych-hazel. 
Its popular name is due to a double mistake in 
nomenclature, which has mixed things up in con- 
fusion worse confounded. The early American 
settlers saw somthing in its foliage or habit of 
growth suggestive of the English witch-hazel, to 
which it is in nowise related. So they transferred 
the old English name to the newly-discovered 
American shrub, being influenced probably by the 
same love for the home-words which prompted them 
to call the red-breasted American thrush a robin 
and the marsh marigold a cowslip. But the Eng- 
lish witch-hazel is not a hazel at all, but an elm 
