has tiptoed above the gully of the creek, beckoning the procession from
the hills, as if in fact they would make back toward that
skyward-pointing finger of granite on the opposite range, from which,
according to the legend, when they were bad Indians and it a great
chief, they ran away. This year the summer floods brought the round,
brown, fruitful cones to my very door, and I look, if I live long
enough, to see them come up greenly in my neighbor's field.

It is interesting to watch this retaking of old ground by the wild
plants, banished by human use. Since Naboth drew 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,
swelli