distant locality, with the once abundant Rhododendron. Nothing in Nature
has for me a more fascinating interest than these secret movements of
vegetation,--the sweet blind instinct with which flowers cling to old
domains until absolutely compelled to forsake them. How touching is the
fact, now well known, that salt-water plants still flower beside the
Great Lakes, yet dreaming of the time when those waters were briny as
the sea! Nothing in the demonstrations of Geology seems grander than the
light lately thrown by Professor Gray, from the analogies between the
flora of Japan and of North America, upon the successive epochs of heat
which led the wandering flowers along the Arctic lands, and of cold
which isolated them once more. Yet doubtless these humble movements
of our local plants may be laying up results as important, and may
hereafter supply evidence of earth's changes upon some smaller scale.

May expands to its prime of beauty; the summer birds come with the
fruit-blossoms, the gardens are deluged with bloom and the air with
melody, while in the woods the timid spring-flowers fold themselves away
in silence and give place to a brighter splendor. On the margin of some
quiet swamp a myriad of bare twigs seem suddenly overspread with purple
butterflies, and we know that the Rhodora is in bloom. Wordsworth never
immortalized a flower more surely than Emerson this, and it needs no
weaker words; there is nothing else in which the change from nakedness
to beauty is so sudden, and when you bring home the great mass of
blossoms they appear all ready to flutter away again from your hands and
leave you disenchanted.

At the same time the beautiful Cornel-tree is in perfection; startling
as a tree of the tropics, it flaunts its great flowers high up among the
forest-branches, intermingling its long slender twigs with theirs, and
garnishing them with alien blooms. It is very available for household