ter wild things,--wild birds, wild
flowers, wild honey, wild berries! There was a country club on Storm
King Mountain, above the Hudson River, where they used to celebrate a
festival of flowers every spring. Men and women who had conservatories
of their own, full of rare plants and costly orchids, came together
to admire the gathered blossoms of the woodlands and meadows. But the
people who had the best of the entertainment were the boys and girls who
wandered through the thickets and down the brooks, pushed their way into
the tangled copses and crept venturesomely across the swamps, to look
for the flowers. Some of the seekers may have had a few gray hairs; but
for that day at least they were all boys and girls. Nature was as young
as ever, and they were all her children. Hand touched hand without a
glove. The hidden blossoms of friendship unfolded. Laughter and merry
shouts and snatches of half-forgotten song rose to the lips. Gay
adventure sparkled in the air. School was out and nobody listened for
the bell. It was just a day to live, and be natural, and take no thought
for the morrow.

There is great luck in this affair of looking for flowers. I do not see
how any one who is prejudiced against games of chance can consistently
undertake it.

For my own part, I approve of garden flowers because they are so orderly
and so certain; but wild flowers I love, just because there is so much
chance about them. Nature is all in favour of certainty in great laws
and of uncertainty in small events. You cannot appoint the day and the
place for her flower-shows. If you happen to drop in at the right moment
she will give you a free admission. But even then it seems as if the
table of beauty had been spread for the joy of a higher visitor, and in
obedience to secret orders which you have not heard.

Have you ever found the fringed gentian?

"Just before the snows,
There came a purple creature
That lavished all the hill:
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.

The frosts were her condition:
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North evoked her,--
'Creator, shall I bloom?'"

There are strange freaks of fortune in the finding of wild flowers,
and curious coincidences which make us feel as if some one were playing
friendly tricks on us. I remember reading, one evening in May, a passage
in a good book called THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS, in which Colonel
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