uets the due proportion of green. The verdant and graceful
sprays of the wild raspberry are unfolded very early, long before its
time of flowering. Over the meadows spread the regular Chinese-pagodas
of the equisetum, (horsetail or scouring-rush,) and the rich coarse
vegetation of the veratrum, or American hellebore. In moist copses the
ferns and osmundas begin to uncurl in April, opening their soft coils
of spongy verdure, coated with woolly down, from which the humming-bird
steals the lining of her nest.

The early blossoms represent the aboriginal epoch of our history: the
blood-root and the May-flower are older than the white man, older
perchance than the red man; they alone are the true Native Americans. Of
the later wild plants, many of the most common are foreign importations.
In our sycophancy we attach grandeur to the name _exotic_: we call
aristocratic garden-flowers by that epithet; yet they are no more exotic
than the humbler companions they brought with them, which have become
naturalized. The dandelion, the buttercup, duckweed, celandine, mullein,
burdock, yarrow, whiteweed, nightshade, and most of the thistles,--these
are importations. Miles Standish never crushed these with his heavy heel
as he strode forth to give battle to the savages; they never kissed the
daintier foot of Priscilla, the Puritan maiden. It is noticeable that
these are all of rather coarser texture than our indigenous flowers; the
children instinctively recognize this, and are apt to omit them, when
gathering the more delicate native blossoms of the woods.

There is something touching in the gradual retirement before
civilization of these delicate aborigines. They do not wait for the
actual brute contact of red bricks and curbstones, but they feel the
danger miles away. The Indians called the low plantain "the white man's
footstep"; and these shy creatures gradually disappear, the moment
the red man gets beyond their hearing. Bigelow's delightful "Florula
Bostoniensis" is becoming a series of epitaphs. Too well we know it,--we
who in happy Cambridge childhood often gathered, almost within a stone's
throw of Professor Agassiz's new Museum, the arethusa and the gentian,
the cardinal-flower and the gaudy rhexia,--we who remember the last
secret hiding-place of the rhodora in West Cambridge, of the yellow
violet and the _Viola debilis_ in Watertown, of the _Convallaria
trifolia_ near Fresh Pond, of the _Hottonia_ beyond Wellington's Hill,