o make bedding of these rough stems. With the whorls
of slim green leaves that climb with the slender stalks the plants
make lace and a green mist all about, underfoot in the marsh, lace
that drapes tall plants to which it clings, a green mist out of
which shine constellations of tiny star blooms. Picking these
constellations to pieces one might place a hundred of the tiny,
four-pointed stars on a copper cent and never overlap the petals,
yet they shine above the green as Orion and Cassiopaea do over the
frost fog of a winter night, they are so vividly white.

I never see this at first. It is only after the tranquillity of
the place has shrunk my unwieldy bulk to the patient potency of
the tiny herbs themselves that I have the sight. It is admirable,
this potent patience of these wee things that are born in bogs yet
in their own world grow stars the memory of which lasts as long in
the consciousness of man as does that of the Pleiades. If you
pluck them you will see by turning them over that these
constellations are as whitely bright to small eyes that look from
below, from the ooze of the bog or the roots of marsh grass, as
they are to our great eyes that look from above. Of an early
September morning in the clear stillness I feel that they loom
like varnished planets of the sky in their own lowly heaven of
coruscating dew that coats all things with a milky way of white
fire drops, a dew that has risen all night from the warmth below
and, chilled by the cold blue void of space, has hesitated on
every leaf and twig, frightened into immobility; infinitesimal
drops as shining white and as close together as the stars in a
winter night sky. At dawn all the bog world is crusted with this
dew.

A great gravelly hill rises abruptly from the southern edge of
this boggy home of shy plants, clothed with century old pines.
These are so high and so dense that the sun's rays cannot come
through with any directness, instead they are so filtered and
reflected from gloss of leaf and gray of trunk that they have no
power to dry up this dew, they simply light it up, nor can the
little morning winds that play at surf bathing in the pine tops,
dancing hand in hand, ducking with little shouts of laughter and
singing songs learned from the roar of breakers on gray rocks,
come down to drink them up; so the stars of this under-forest
heaven remain to keep the bedstraw constellations company until
nearly noon. By way of the lower heaven of