nist, but I have long found pleasure in herb-gathering. I
love to come upon a plant which is unknown to me, to identify it with the
help of my book, to greet it by name when next it shines beside my path.
If the plant be rare, its discovery gives me joy. Nature, the great
Artist, makes her common flowers in the common view; no word in human
language can express the marvel and the loveliness even of what we call
the vulgarest weed, but these are fashioned under the gaze of every
passer-by. The rare flower is shaped apart, in places secret, in the
Artist's subtler mood; to find it is to enjoy the sense of admission to a
holier precinct. Even in my gladness I am awed.

To-day I have walked far, and at the end of my walk I found the little
white-flowered wood-ruff. It grew in a copse of young ash. When I had
looked long at the flower, I delighted myself with the grace of the slim
trees about it--their shining smoothness, their olive hue. Hard by stood
a bush of wych elm; its tettered bark, overlined as if with the character
of some unknown tongue, made the young ashes yet more beautiful.

It matters not how long I wander. There is no task to bring me back; no
one will be vexed or uneasy, linger I ever so late. Spring is shining
upon these lanes and meadows; I feel as if I must follow every winding
track that opens by my way. Spring has restored to me something of the
long-forgotten vigour of youth; I walk without weariness; I sing to
myself like a boy, and the song is one I knew in boyhood.

That reminds me of an incident. Near a hamlet, in a lonely spot by a
woodside, I came upon a little lad of perhaps ten years old, who, his
head hidden in his arms against a tree trunk, was crying bitterly. I
asked him what was the matter, and, after a little trouble--he was better
than a mere bumpkin--I learnt that, having been sent with sixpence to pay
a debt, he had lost the money. The poor little fellow was in a state of
mind which in a grave man would be called the anguish of despair; he must
have been crying for a long time; every muscle in his face quivered as if
under torture, his limbs shook; his eyes, his voice, uttered such misery
as only the vilest criminal should be made to suffer. And it was because
he had lost sixpence!

I could have shed tears with him--tears of pity and of rage at all this
spectacle implied. On a day of indescribable glory, when earth and
heaven shed benedictions upon the soul of man, a