ms such as, for beauty and fragrance, are
worthy to be, as they really are, cousin to the rose. On one of my
rambles I came upon some plants of a strangely slim and prim aspect;
nothing but a straight, erect, military-looking, needle-like stalk,
bearing a spike of pods at the top, and clasped at the middle by two
small stemless leaves. By some occult means (perhaps their growing with
_Tiarella_ had something to do with the matter) I felt at once that
these must be the mitrewort (_Mitella diphylla_). My prophetic soul was
not always thus explicit and infallible, however. Other novelties I saw,
about which I could make no such happy impromptu guess. And here the
manual afforded little assistance; for it has not yet been found
practicable to "analyze," and so to identify plants simply by the stem
and foliage,--although I remember to have been told, to be sure, of a
young lady who professed that at her college the instruction in botany
was so thorough that it was possible for the student to name any plant
in the world from seeing only a single leaf! But her college was not
Harvard, and Professor Gray has probably never so much as heard of such
an admirable method.

On the whole, it is good to have the curiosity piqued with here and
there a vegetable stranger,--its name and even its family relationship a
mystery. The leaf is nothing extraordinary, perhaps, yet who knows but
that the bloom may be of the rarest beauty? Or the leaf is of a gracious
shape and texture, but how shall we tell whether the flower will
correspond with it? No; we must do with them as with chance
acquaintances of our own kind. The man looks every inch a gentleman; his
face alone seems a sufficient guaranty of good-breeding and
intelligence; but none the less,--and not forgetting that charity
thinketh no evil,--we shall do well to wait till we have heard him talk
and seen how he will behave, before we put a final label upon him. Wait
for the blossom and the fruit (the blossom _is_ the fruit in its first
stage); for the old rule is still the true one,--alike in botany and in
morals,--"By their fruits ye shall know them."

What a world within a world the forest is! Under the trees were the
shrubs,--knee-high rock-maples making the ground verdant for acres
together, or dwarf thickets of yew, now bearing green acorn-like
berries; while below these was a variegated carpet, oxalis and the
flower of Linnaeus, ferns and club-mosses (the glossy _Lycopodium
luci