beset it around. The yarrow now seen by the roadside and that gathered on the summit of Mount Washington on that August day are closely linked together in my thought as an illustration of the capacity some plants have of adapting themselves to a new environment.

Near the railroad crossing on the road from Millbury to Wilkinsonville is the one place where I have found our one representative of the order Rutaceæ, most of which are natives of South America and the temperate climes of other lands. This is the northern prickly ash, not at all connected, except in name, with our other ash-trees. Its branches are covered with strong, sharp prickles, arranged in no definite order, and the leaves are pinnate. The bark is bitter, aromatic and stimulant, sometimes used to alleviate the toothache; from which fact it is sometimes called toothache-tree.

It is the heaviest

The shagbark or shellbark hickory is easily the chief of all the trees in our list. The genus is an exclusively North American one. The uses to which its wood is put are very numerous. As fuel, it stands at the head of all trees in our climate. of our native woods and yields, cord for cord, more heat than any other, in any shape in which it may be consumed. Its specific gravity is .8372; its relative approximate fuel value is .8311. It is worthy of cultivation for its nuts alone.

The poison ivy (Rhus Toxicodendron, L.) is one of the few plants of this neighborhood poisonous to the touch, although all persons are not affected by it. It is easily identified by the three leaflets forming a compound leaf. Its blossoms show its kinship with the sumachs. The bittersweet (Solanum Dulcamara, L.) proves its kinship with the potato as effectively by its blossoms, and by the fact that both are a prey to the same enemy, the Colorado beetle. In the middle of a swamp, far from any cultivated field, the beetle finds the bittersweet, and unterrified by Paris green feeds in quiet and multiplies unseen.

In the low meadows the nodding flowers of the purple avens contrast finely with the brighter colors around. The surface of this little pool is covered with yellow flowers which prove, on closer inspection, to be buttercups, but with what strange leaves under the water! On the upland the ox-eye daisy shines afar. But these are not all; other flowers fill other spaces, each contributing its mite to clothe the earth with beauty. It is a pleasure to me that I have been able to see so many of them in other years, so that now I can welcome them as old friends in the old familiar places.

THE MID-JUNE FLOWERS.

Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing, into a pure and wholesome region of solemn joy and wonder.

-KINGSLEY-Glaucus.

The mid-June grasses, tall and lush, used to bend over a brook, a wonderful brook it seemed to be then, which came from somewhere beyond the low hills. which formed the Ultima Thule of the boys' world, and flowed through the wide meadow to join the great river. There was a current rumor among the boys that the river flowed into the ocean somewhere, but none of them had seen the ocean. A section of the brook and a section of the river formed in summer a large part of their little world, and they did not trouble themselves about the mysteries of the source of the one or the remote course of the other. It was sufficient for them that the meadow and the brook and the river were overflowing with a life like their own. They

wandered through the grass in the meadow, and saw it wave in the gentle breeze; they startled the fish in the brook and ran along the bank to see more of their wonderful life. They watched the water plants rise and fall with the current, and delighted in the rippling music of the brook where it slipped hurriedly over the pebbles. Sometimes they crept with stealthy tread to the margin with short poles and pieces of wire to snare the little pickerel which lay so motionless near the surface, but which awoke all too soon to a sense of danger and darted out of sight. They ran, hat in hand, after the butterflies which rose from the flowers amid the grass; they hunted for the nests of birds which fluttered timidly before them. They delighted in seeing frogs dive into the brook and swim under the bank for shelter, and they poked them out of their hiding-places to watch their frantic efforts to escape.

The sun

Life was all about them and in them. shine filled their little world with brightness. Light Consciously or unconsciously, they

was life to them.

reveled in both.

The days were long, because they were so full of pleasure, and the seasons and the years seemed almost endless.

There were times when the boys tired of the brook and climbed the railroad embankment that bordered the meadow and separated it from the great river. There they watched men fishing, who caught great

strings of yellow perch and dace and pickerel; and they took their first lessons in that noble art. Best of all, they were learning to love with an abiding love the wild things of the field, the wood, the water and the air, a love which afterwards developed into reverence for the wonderful Nature around them. Bird and insect and flower entered into their life, and have since added no small charm to the pleasure of existence, for the interest in these things has not been lost amid the toil and the coil incident to a busy, earnest manhood. Books were scarcer in those days than they are now, but somehow the boys learned to know many things which were handed down from preceding generations of boys by oral tradition. They did not know all the birds by name, but they had names for all the common ones and knew their habits. Their quick eyes could detect a night-hawk sitting along a high limb, and they could. dissolve any doubt about it by hitting the limb with a stone if one was near, or by jarring the tree, to make the bird fly. They knew where to look for a pigeonwoodpecker's nest, how to get a chipmunk out of his hole, and the places along the river where you could be sure to get a good string of fish.

Most of the lore learned in this way is not forgotten. It is usually learned by heart and becomes a part of one's nature. It helps us, also, very much to appreciate book-lore, and, perhaps, aids in developing