ut there is no
use to become discouraged before I start. I haven't begun to hunt her
yet. Until I do, I might as well believe that she will walk across the
bridge and take possession just as soon as I get the last chair leg
polished. She might! She came in the dream, and to come actually
couldn't be any more real. I'll make a stiff hunt of it before I give
up, if I ever do. I never yet have made a complete failure of anything.
But just now I am hunting skunk cabbage. It's precisely the time to take
it."

Across the lake, in the swampy woods, close where the screech owl sang
and the girl of the golden dream walked in the moonlight the Harvester
began operations. He unrolled the sack, went to one end of the bed and
systematically started a swath across it, lifting every other plant
by the roots. Flowering time was almost past, but the bees knew where
pollen ripened, and hummed incessantly over and inside the queer
cone-shaped growths with their hooked beaks. It almost appeared as if
the sound made inside might be to give outsiders warning not to poach
on occupied territory, for the Harvester noticed that no bee entered a
pre-empted plant.

With skilful hand each stroke brought up a root and he tossed it to one
side. The plants were vastly peculiar things. First they seemed to be a
curled leaf with no flower. In colour they shaded from yellow to almost
black mahogany, and appeared as if they were a flower with no leaf.
Closer examination proved there was a stout leaf with a heavy outside
mid-rib, the tip of which curled over in a beak effect, that wrapped
around a peculiar flower of very disagreeable odour. The handling of
these plants by the hundred so intensified this smell the Harvester
shook his head.

"I presume you are mostly mine," he said to the busy little workers
around him. "If there is anything in my theory of honey having varying
medicinal properties at different seasons, right now mine should be
good for Granny's rheumatism and for nervous and dropsical people. I
shouldn't think honey flavoured with skunk cabbage would be fit to eat.
But, of course, it isn't all this. There is catkin pollen on the wind,
hazel and sassafras are both in bloom now, and so are several of the
earliest little flowers of the woods. You can gather enough of them
combined to temper the disagreeable odour into a racy sweetness, and all
the shrub blooms are good tonics, too, and some of the earthy ones. I'm
going to try giving some