42 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
After the trees are denuded of their scarlet splendor, and the 
woods are bleak and bare, we wander gravely through the groves 
or over the dusty roads, seeking almost vainly for some reminder 
of departed summer, a belated aster, a turtle head, or a frost-nip- 
ped gentian. The dark green Christmas fern (Polystichum 
acrostichoides) , has a very certain beauty new, and how familiar 
the rough twisting rope of wild grape appears. In summer its 
foilage we never saw — only the brown shaggy vine—and its ap- 
pearance is now unchanged. By the aid of a friendly chestnut, it 
rears its head so loftily and ripens its fruit with the fruit of the 
giants of the wood. It is to be regretted that sometime, no doubt 
through fear of a tumble to earth, it is induced to lay too firm and 
fast a grip on its host, often so tightly that it slowly strangles its 
friend, like a giant in the toils of a serpent. 
The flowers are green and unconspicuous, but they amply com- 
pensate for their lack of beauty by their fullness of fragrance. A 
grape or a basswood may be perceived by its fragrance a consid- 
erable distance away, and there is probably no other wild vege- 
table odors so intoxicatingly fragrant and possessing their power 
of expansion. 
A common wild grape is ( Vistis labritsca), and one of the most 
valuable of the species indiginous to this continent. The dandies 
of the gardens and vineyards trace their ancestry to this honest 
backwoods stock. By reason of its hardiness and freedom from 
disease it is even replacing the European species, Vinefera, in the 
vineyards of the old world. The rich expressed juice, after a 
proper sojourn in the cellar is converted into good prime wine and 
the excellence of the crushed skins as a jelly or tart iieeds no com- 
mendation. Old fashioned cider-makers maintain that a bunch 
of the small frost grapes {V. cordifolia) , dropped into a barrel of 
fresh sweet cider mellows its flavor and prevents hardening. 
Along the thicket lined roads towards the latter part of the 
month of June, the breeze is laden with the fragrance of the elder 
{Samhitciis.) A week later the ground is cloaked with the cast- 
off corollas, and by the last of August the full clusters of blue 
black fruit are proper for manufacture into the country house- 
wife's aperient and diuretic elderberry wine. Wood of two 
years' growth is adaptable to the making of cobbler's pegs. The 
