with all bushes, it frowns upon, as a model
housekeeper frowns upon dirt. A plain brown carpet suits it best, with a
modest figure of green--preferably of evergreen--woven into it; a
tracery of partridge-berry vine, or, it may be, of club moss, with here
and there a tuft of pipsissewa and pyrola. Its mood is sombre, its taste
severe. Yet I please myself with noticing that the pine wood, like the
rest of us, is not without its freak, its amiable inconsistency, its one
"tender spot," as we say of each other. It makes a pet of one of our
oddest, brightest, and showiest flowers, the pink lady's-slipper, and by
some means or other has enticed it away from the peat bog, where it
surely should be growing, along with the calopogon, the pogonia, and the
arethusa, and here it is, like some rare exotic, thriving in a bed of
sand and on a mat of brown needles. Who will undertake to explain the
occult "elective affinity" by which this rosy orchid is made so much at
home under the heavy shadow of the Weymouth pine?

According to the common saying, there is no accounting for tastes. If by
this is meant simply that _we_ cannot account for them, the statement is
true enough. But if we are to speak exactly, there are no likes nor
dislikes except for cause. Every freak of taste, like every vagary of
opinion, has its origin and history, and, with sufficient knowledge on
our part, could be explained and justified. The pine-tree and the orchid
are not friends by accident, however the case may look to us who cannot
see behind the present nor beneath the surface. There are no mysteries
_per se_, but only to the ignorant. Yet ignorance itself, disparagingly
as we talk of it, has its favorable side,--as it is pleasant sometimes
to withdraw from the sun and wander for a season in the half-light of
the forest. Perhaps we need be in no haste to reach a world where there
is never any darkness. In some moods, at least, I go with the
partridge-berry vine and the lady's-slipper. It is good, I think, to
live awhile longer in the shadow; to see as through a glass darkly; and
to hear overhead, not plain words, but inarticulate murmurs.

I am not to be understood as praising the pine at the expense of other
trees. All things considered, no evergreen can be equal to a
summer-green, on which we see the leaves budding, unfolding, ripening,
and falling,--a "worlde whiche neweth everie daie." What would winter be
worth without the naked branches of maples and e