FINDING TRAILING ARBUTUS — 35 
sunset. But no leaf hinted strongly at bud. 
The wind was sharp. The sea was near. From 
where we hunted the arbutus the sea was blue 
against the scene. The pines were moaning 
with the wanderings of winds fresh from their 
wanderings on the windy sea. What poetries 
are in pines and music wooed from them by 
sea winds! And here we men, a little company 
of watchers for the spring dawn, hunted the 
trailing arbutus if peradventure it might be at 
flower. The skies were dull: the evening was 
not far away; the seas sung in the pinetops; the 
granite bowlders lay careless whether spring 
came or whether flowers ever bloomed. 
We hunted in ones, every man going his own 
way if so be there should come to him alone the 
miracle of the first scent and sea-shell tint of 
this earliest flower which has set all the New 
England bards at song. The leaves of oak trees 
which mixed with the pines covered the ground 
thick with their brown loveliness which all 
lovers of the woods count one of the mercies 
of the forest; and there where the leaves gathered 
thick and covered the earth so that not a spot 
of earth looked through, against a bowlder 
unscathed with years, I found the arbutus—the 
trailing arbutus at flower. 
The scent was scarcely appreciable, the blos- 
soms were so few and the flowers were barely 
visible, so hid beneath their coverlet of leaves; 
but O, the advent of it and the miracle of those 
