90 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
the edge, but the less ground there is bare, the 
more we make of it. Such a day as this I re¬ 
sort where the partridges, etc., do, to the bare 
ground and the sheltered sides of woods and 
hills, and there explore the moist ground for 
the radical leaves of plants while the storm 
lowers overhead, and I forget how the time is 
passing. If the weather is thick and stormy 
enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and 
wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel 
weather-beaten, you may consume the after¬ 
noon to advantage, thus browsing along the 
edge of some near wood which would scarcely 
detain you at all in fair weather, and you will 
get as far away there as at the end of your 
longest fair-weather walk, and come home as if 
from an adventure. There is no better fence 
to put between you and the village than a storm 
into which the villagers do not venture out. I 
go looking for green radical leaves. What a 
dim and shadowy existence have now to our 
memories the fair flowers whose localities they 
mark! How hard to find any trace of their 
stem now after it has been flattened under the 
snows of the winter. I go feeling with wet and 
freezing fingers amid the withered grass and 
the snow for their prostrate stems that I may 
reconstruct the plant. But greenness so ab¬ 
sorbs my attention that sometimes I do not see 
