enclosed in an aril.' Now it may be safe for pigs and billy-goats to
tackle such a compound as that, but we boys all like to know what we are
eating, and I cannot but feel that the public health officials of every
township should require this formula of Dr. Gray's to be printed on every
one of these big loaded pills, if that is what they are really made of."

Another interesting plant is the _trillium erectum_, which with the
_trillium recurvatum_, is now to be found in the woods hereabouts. The
flowers of the _trillium erectum_ are ill scented, carrion scented, if
you please. Now the botanists have found that this odor, which is so
unpleasant to the human nostrils, does the plant a real service by
attracting the common green flesh-flies, such as are seen in the
butchershops in the summer-time. They eat the pollen, which is supposed
to taste as it smells and thus as they go from flower to flower they
carry pollen from one blossom to another and so secure for the plant
cross-pollination.

So we may walk from one flower to another until the morning wears to a
bright noon and the afternoon wanes into a songful sunset.

* * * * *

In the swamp, where the red-winged blackbird is building her bulky nest
between the stems of the cat tail, and the prairie marsh wren is making
her second or third little globular nest in a similar place, there is a
blaze of yellow from the marsh marigolds which make masses of succulent
stems and leaves, crowned with pale gold, as far up the marsh as the eye
can reach. In Iowa, it is in May, rather than in June, that "the cowslip
startles the meadows green" and "the buttercup catches the sun in its
chalice." And it is in late April or early May that "the robin is
plastering his house hard by." By the way, ought not the poet to have
made it "her" house? It is the mother bird who seems to do the
plastering. Both birds work on the structure, but it appears to be the
female who carries most of the mud and who uses her faded red apron for a
trowel as she moves round in her nest pushing her breast against the
round wall of the adobe dwelling to spread the mud evenly. The work on
one particular nest was done in late April when there was nothing on the
elm but the seed fringes to screen the builder as she worked. Then the
four light greenish-blue eggs were laid. A red squirrel got one of them
one day. Disregarding the squeakings and scoldings of the anxious
robins, he s