triumphant life, appealing to the worker in us.
Here, of course, we touch hands with all the races of the world for whom
winter has been the supreme menace, spring the supreme and saving miracle.
But each race has its own symbols, and to the New Englander the symbol is
the arbutus.

This may seem a bit of sentimentality. And, indeed, we need not expect to
find it expressed by any New England farmer. New England does not go out
in gay companies to bring back the first blossoms. But New England does
nothing in gay companies. It has been taught to distrust ceremonies and
expression of any sort. It rejoices with reticence, it appreciates with a
reservation. And yet I have seen a sprig of arbutus in rough and clumsy
buttonholes on weather-faded lapels which, the rest of the twelve-month
through, know no other flower. And when, in unfamiliar country, I have
interrupted the ploughing to ask for guidance, I usually get it:--"Arbutus?
Yaas. The's a lot of it up along that hillside and in the woods over
beyond--'t was out last week, some of it, I happened to notice"--this in the
apologetic tone of one who admits a weakness--"guess you'll find all you
want." I venture to say that of no other wild flower, except those which
work specific harm or good, could I get such information.

To many of us, city-bred, the tradition comes through inheritance. It
means, perhaps, the shy, poetic side of our father's boyhood, only half
acknowledged, after the New England fashion, but none the less real and
none the less our possession. It means rare days, when the city--whose
chiefest signs of spring were the flare of dandelions in yards and parks
and the chatter of English sparrows on ivy-clad church walls--was left
behind, and we were "in the country." It was a country excitingly
different from the country of the summer vacation, a country not deeply
green, but warmly brown, and sweet with the smell of moist, living earth.
Green enough, indeed, in the spring-fed meadows and folds of the hills,
where the early grass flashes into vividest emerald, but in the woods the
soft mist-colored mazes of multitudinous twigs still show through their
veilings and dustings of color--palest green of birches, gray-green of
poplar, yellow-green of willows, and redder tones of the maples; and along
the fence-lines and roadsides--blessed, untidy fence-lines and roadsides of
New England--a fine penciling of red stems--the cut-back maple bushes and
tangled vines al