The fruit, consisting of two long and slender follicles, filled with seeds tipped with long silky hairs, shows their kinship to the milkweeds, which are also well represented in the list. The sweetbrier is one of the most welcome emi grants from the Old World. There is an odor of very pleasant association about it, apart from its own perfume and fleeting beauty. The bright petals of the wild rose flash out upon us, to our glad surprise, from many a thicket, and lead us to utter the prayer, "Floreat regina florum." About thirty species of wild roses are now recognized as native of the northern hemisphere, reaching from the Arctic circle as far south as Mexico, Abyssinia and India, while the varieties of cultivated roses are almost countless and are yearly increasing. Our wild rose, though a humble member of the genus, may well be proud of its family connection. For more than two thousand years the rose has been celebrated by the poets; it has been surrounded by the most pleasant legends; it has found a place among the traditions as among the customs of many peoples. Its family was already an old one when Romulus and Remus were drifting down the Tiber to the site of Rome; it is older than the pyramids. While the genus Rosa fills so large a space that its lore is almost a literature, the order Rosacea fills even a wider space, embracing about a thousand species, and including many valuable cultivated plants. Here belong the delicious fruits of the apple, pear, peach, plum, cherry, quince, apricot, strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, in their numberless varieties. What a space the word apple,- for we can hardly believe that it is always the fruit known to us by that name-holds in ancient literature! One illustration will suffice. In far-off Greek days, at the nuptial feast of Peleus and Thetis, to which all the gods and goddesses had been invited except Discord, this divinity, out of revenge at her exclusion, threw a golden apple upon the board, with the inscription, "For the most fair." Out of this incident came a train of circumstances which led to the Trojan war and the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Eneid and, in fact, a whole cycle of ancient and modern poetry. Wordsworth's "Laodamia," Tennyson's "Enone," Morris's "The Death of Paris" show the influence of the old tale. Beauty and fragrance and worth are preeminent characteristics of this order, though not shared in by all its members equally. Many of the valuable species are at home in our county, either wild or cultivated. There is no fairer sight to be seen in mid-May than an apple - orchard in perfection of bloom; if there is, it must be the same orchard in perfection of fruit. Beside the two roses in the list, there are the meadow-sweet, a little shrub well worthy of cultivation, and the mountain-ash, one of our most ornamental trees, and a small running blackberry, representatives of our thirty-six or thirty-seven species. By roadsides the whiteweed now begins to be abundant, and on the edge of swamps the cat-tail flag is blooming. In the low meadows, especially on the edges of ditches, the poison hemlock opens its small white flowers, under the shade, it may be, of the elder or the poison dogwood. There are three bright-colored orchids in the list, the little Pogonia, the Calopogon and the larger, more majestic Habenaria, the latter being one of our handsomest species, and well upholding the reputation of the order for novelty and beauty. The grasses and sedges play a larger part in filling the landscape, especially those species not valued for forage. Whereever moisture is, there these are abundant. Without them the early summer landscape would lose an indefinable and, perhaps, unrecognized charm. THE EARLY JULY FLOWERS. A pleasing land of drowsyhead it was, The Castle of Indolence lies in fairy Summer Land. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, sees it set amid sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns and flowery beds, and his keen ear listens to the prattle of the purling rills, to the lowing of the herds along the vale and to the flocks loud-bleating from the distant hills and there rises to our minds as fair a picture of the poet's dream as words can paint. Such pictures belong to summer only. Winter is too serious for such trifling. The stern realities of life are then too apparent, are not to be concealed. There seems to be something in the nature of summer which incites the mind to linger over such pictures. The bright warm sunlight is in sympathy with the dolce far niente spirit in man. Everything about him is growing for him, and why should he not rest and enjoy the fair vision? A stern necessity admonishes him that the hard fates have ordained otherwise. Propt on beds of amaranth and moly in the land of the Lotos, he wearies of the sea, wearies of the oar, merely dreams of fatherland, of wife and child, ceases to think of returning home, until some sage Ulysses leads him back weeping to the hollow ships, and bids to make speed away from the enchanted shore. But if all the long summer days cannot be given to rest, a part of them can be and ought to be, so that we may see and appreciate the beauty that lies at our feet or before our doors. I have seen from Bethlehem, New Hampshire, the sun sink behind the distant hills, painting the western sky in gorgeous colors and flooding the valley of the Ammonoosuc with purple light; and I have seen from Worcester the sun sink behind Tetaessit Hill in a sky of ineffable beauty, while all the hillside and the valley between were wrapped in richest purple. I have looked down from Mount Washington upon half of New Hampshire spread below, and from Mount Wachusett upon half of Worcester County; the former surpasses in rugged grandeur, but the latter in |