THE WILD-FLOWERS OF SPRING. 
I T is not at all strange that among us the spring-tide 
should be the theme of frequent and enamored refer¬ 
ences by our poets and imaginative writers. Its coming 
gives new life to all the dormant powers of nature. And 
in the presence of this universal quickening, it is easy to 
fancy the “ rosy-footed ” genius of the season winding 
her mellow horn adown the hillsides and through the 
valleys, awakening the sleeping flowers and leading back 
the forest songsters to their accustomed haunts. The 
suddenness with which some of these “ eldest daughters 
■of the spring ” leap into life and into bloom is remarkable, 
Yonder, under those spreading oaks, where the ground 
is covered with dry leaves and grass, half buried in the 
soil, perhaps, or covered with its own or other leaves, the 
rarest favorite of the early spring, the trailing arbutus, 
lifts up its white and pink cups of incense and sends out 
its greeting: “ Spring is come.” In favorable seasons 
these can be gathered early in April and sometimes even 
in March. How early do you suppose the Pilgrim Fathers 
found it ? How glad they must have been to welcome it, 
the very first flower in their new home! No wonder that, 
from their gratefulness, they gave it the name of May- 
indicating, indeed, that all winter long their sleep had been 
very light—-a half-waking—so that the first and faintest 
breath of spring sufficed to call them forth. 
The first-born children of the year, the earliest wild- 
flowers—how welcome they are ! Some of these flowers 
are so shy that nobody ever knows when they appear. 
They open stealthily in the warm sun, under the snow, 
and only the very adventurous will be the first discoverers. 
Before the'winter is fairly gone pussy willow has climbed 
with her small , silky catkins—a very fit name the botanists 
have found for her attempt at a blossom—up the slender 
wands of the shrub where she belongs, and stays there 
safely wrapped from the cold, looking out for spring, 
watching for the first flower that will bear her company. 
She does not wait long. 
flower, after the ship that had been the vessel of their 
hopes and that brought them to the New World. 
The botanists call it Epigaa repens, which indicates 
exactly its manner of growing closely to the earth. It is 
an evergreen vine creeping upon the ground and hiding 
itself under whatever may lie upon its surface. Its rose- 
colored flowers grow in clusters, with a salver-formed 
corolla of delicate petals resting in a calyx. I have heard 
it called ground-laurel and wild lilac, as. well as arbutus 
and Mayflower. It smells as sweetly and looks as freshly 
with either name. 
While the snow still lingers in our garden border and 
banks of white are visible along the edges of the fields, 
here on the border of the wood where the ground slopes 
southward, we shall find the modest and exquisitely deli- 
