266 AT THE NORTH OF BEARCAMP WATER ,. 
they had been feeding in the yellow grasses, 
and vibrated away with merry calls until swal¬ 
lowed up in fog and rain. 
The wasting of the snow under the hot sun 
of Monday and the cloudy sky but mild air of 
Tuesday had left many plants and dried flower- 
stalks exposed to view. Plum-colored masses 
of berry bushes encroached upon the wide ex¬ 
panse of snow as headlands reach out into a 
calm sea. Tiny forests of wiry grass reared 
their heads above the snow. In color they were 
what is called 66 sandy.” Goldenrod and aster 
stems, holding aloft dry and brittle suggestions 
of long-lost flowers; the heads of brunella, look¬ 
ing like chess castles, and of the Indian pipe, 
upright and pineapple-shaped; and many deli¬ 
cate hairlike stems from which alj. trace of leaf 
and flower had departed, broke the evenness of 
the snow fields, and were beautiful in an unas¬ 
suming, unconscious, unintentional way. In¬ 
deed, many of them had never shone with 
beauty before. In summer, submerged in the 
wilderness of green things which crowd the 
unplowed intervale, they could not have been 
found by the eye of any one in chance passing. 
But in winter, the time of their nominal beauty 
gone, they lingered in their old age, and looked 
more beautiful in their bleached simplicity than 
those summer flowers which never gave them a 
chance to reveal what was in them. 
