THE FIRST SNOWDROP. 
29 
or food of these interesting creatures, or to account for the web 
of the larva. 
I think I have mentioned the various sundews found on the 
run and the large number of different insects they entrap. They 
are by no means the only carnivorous plants in the colony. In 
the forests we have a scarlet toadstool ; this fungus attracts and 
captures insects by its pungent odour and brilliant scarlet 
colouring. There is a shrub also whose seeds are covered with 
a gum so tenacious that sparrows and other small birds are 
caught wholesale. Not long ago I found a fully fledged wax- 
eye entangled in the barbed seeds of a lush grass ; these seeds 
adhere also to the collies’ coats. 
At the very end of the month the leaves of our few de- 
ciduous trees begin to fall, but autumn does not arrive fully till 
March, with its latest flowers and earliest frosts. 
Tutiva Lake, Napier, 
New Zealand. 
H. Guthrie-Smith. 
THE FIRST SNOWDROP. 
ERE on the edge of the wood a speck of white, like a 
drifted snowflake, catches my eyes, and I stop to gather 
my first snowdrop — a simple flower of the Order 
Amaryllidaceee I happen to know, but as I hold it lightly 
between my fingers and gaze on it with admiring eyes, I think 
only of its beauty. The purity of its milk-white blossom, the 
tiny splashes of green just showing on its inner segments, the 
graceful bend of its downcast head, guarded by two sentinels of 
green leaves, engender thoughts that surround the flower with a 
halo of fancy, which long botanical names might only dispel. 
My eyes glance from it to the dark ground whence it sprang. 
I see the brown withered fronds of the bracken trodden and 
broken, the long straggling shoot of the bramble bearing nothing 
but its own cruel thorns, the dark tree trunks with bare limbs 
leading up to the delicate tracery of slender twigs drawn against 
a leaden sky, and life seems gone from them all. Missing is the 
wealth of green undergrowth which sheltered so well the rabbit 
and pheasant, gone from the trees are the leaves that whispered 
in response to each summer breeze, gone are the clinging 
tendrils and shapely leaves of the bindweed, the blossom of the 
briar, the stars of the stitchwort. They were, but have passed 
away, and as far as any sign they themselves give, may never 
be again. And it is only now that we really miss them. The 
bugle and the bittercress, the periwinkle and the mallow, gained 
but a passing glance and thought when under brighter skies we 
met them at every step. But now the winds of autumn and the 
