rew his fence about the
field and restricted it to a few wild-eyed steers, halting between the
hills and the shambles, many old habitues of the field have come back
to their haunts. The willow and brown birch, long ago cut off by the
Indians for wattles, have come back to the streamside, slender and
virginal in their spring greenness, and leaving long stretches of the
brown water open to the sky. In stony places where no grass grows,
wild olives sprawl; close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more
translucent greenish gold in spring than any aureole. Along with willow
and birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders,
slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the village
street. Convinced after three years that it would come no nearer, we
spent time fruitlessly pulling up roots to plant in the garden. All this
while, when no coaxing or care prevailed upon any transplanted slip
to grow, one was coming up silently outside the fence near the wicket,
coiling so secretly in the rabbit-brush that its presence was never
suspected until it flowered delicately along its twining length. The
horehound comes through the fence and under it, shouldering the pickets
off the railings; the brier rose mines under the horehound; and no care,
though I own I am not a close weeder, keeps the small pale moons of the
primrose from rising to the night moth under my apple-trees. The
first summer in the new place, a clump of cypripediums came up by the
irrigating ditch at the bottom of the lawn. But the clematis will not
come inside, nor the wild almond.

I have forgotten to find out, though I meant to, whether the wild almond
grew in that country where Moses kept the flocks of his father-in-law,
but if so one can account for the burning bush. It comes upon one with
a flame-burst as of revelation; little hard red buds on leafless twigs,
swelling unnoticeably, then one, two, or three strong suns, and from tip
to tip one soft fiery glow, whispering with bees as a singing flame. A
twig of finger size will be furred to the thickness of one's wrist by
pink five-petaled bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees
find their way in it. In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of
fruit too often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny,
tap-rooted shrubs are resistant to most plant evils.

It is not easy always to be attentive to the maturing of wild fruit.
Plants are so unobtrusive in th