illiance. Circles of creamy white here and
there among the hazel brush mark the later blossoms of the sweet
viburnum. Sweeping curves like sculptured arms bearing thickly clustered
hemispheres of purplish white are seen on the rocky slope where the
nine-bark grows above the lingering columbines. White wands which look so
beautiful are merely the ends of the common tall blackberry, and the wild
rose sweetens the same banks. Flattish clusters of creamy white blossoms
are the loose cymes of the red osier dogwood, but it is not nearly so
beautiful now as it was last January when its blood-red stems made a
striking contrast with the snow. The bright carmine bark has faded to a
dull green and the shrub is a disappointment now, despite its blossoms.
So is the cottonwood a disappointment. Its wealth of shining green
foliage is beautiful, yet we sigh for the lost glory of the midwinter
days when the horizontal rays of the setting sun made aureoles of golden
light around its yellow, shining limbs.

* * * * *

It is worth while on a walk in June to sit and look at the grass. How
tame and dreary would be the landscape without it! How soul starved would
have been mankind, condemned to live without the restfulness of its
unobtrusive beauty! That is why the first command, after the waters had
been gathered into one place and the dry land appeared, was, "Let the
earth bring forth grass." The grasses cover the earth like a beautiful
garment from Kerguelen land in the Antarctic regions to the extreme limit
of vegetation beyond the Polar circle. They climb the Andes, the Rockies,
and the Himalayas to the very line of eternal snow, and they creep to the
bottom of every valley where man dares set his foot. They come up fresh
and green from the melting snows of earliest spring and linger in sunny
autumn glens when all else is dead and drear. They give intense interest
to the botanist as he remembers that there are thirty-five hundred
different species, a thousand of which are in North America and a fourth
of that number in our own state. They give him delightful studies as he
patiently compares their infinite variations of culms and glumes, spikes,
racemes, and panicles. They give joy to the farmer with their wealth of
protein and fat and albuminoid, the material to do the work and make the
wealth of the world bulging from their succulent stems. And they are
fascinating most of all to the nature-lover as he see