on every rood of our rocky Cape; for the same lavishment of flowers on this "fair headland" is witnessed to-day. In whatever direction the florist strays, the wild-flowers hear his step, and wave to him their showy and bold, or timid and modest signals of recognition and welcome. The rich may withhold from him such favor and encouragement as they might bestow; for the flowers will come to him with their silver and golden cups, and make him opulent. The holders of place, and dispensers of position and honor, may deny his ability to take upon himself responsibility and trust, and refuse to clothe him with the robes of power; for the flowers will lead him into paths traversing fields of the noblest and most delightful employment, and will bring to him, as the best and most glorious symbols of eminence, their own royal blue and purple and scarlet. The door-keepers and guardians of refined and polished society may fail to perceive his intellectual and spiritual fitness for the order of life to which he would be admitted; for the flowers will open to him their own wide gates, arched with vines and decorated with leaves and blossoms; grant him admission to companionship which cannot be lowered by the dross of envy and jealousy, or the alloy of vanity; receive him with acclamations which, though silent, are heard by his inward ear; pass by him in gay processions, waving flags of every hue, and swinging censers filled with the sweetest incense. With them he

will have the wealth, place, distinction, employment, society, pomp, and aroma, which no change or revolution in the world of human life can affect.

The trailing arbutus in the Magnolia Woods comes in the spring with its sweet benediction; the hepatica, in the same locality and almost everywhere. The white flowers of the blood-root deck a few sunny slopes. The dog's-tooth violets swing their golden bells. The delicate wind-flowers tremble to the lightest breeze. The yellow cowslips star the swamps. The blue violets tuft the fields, pastures, and roadsides. The dandelions smile on the lawn, in the edge of the wood, in the mowing, on the shore of the sea, on the border of every path, and in the very track of passing feet.. The innocents, or quaker-girls, come in swarms, whitening the sward. The saxifrage holds up to be seen its modest little cyme. The yellow violets show themselves cautiously on a few sunny slopes. The columbines adorn the ledges and cliffs, growing where the soil is gravelly and thin, and from cracks and crevices in the steep fronts of granite piles of every height. The white violets spread in squads over many moist or springy places. They are precious though tiny flowers, both for delicacy and exquisite fragrance. The nodding wake-robins, coming with the warmth and glory of summer, hang their heads in thickets by the wall, or in the shade of the woods, as if ashamed of their own unpleasant atmosphere. The smiling wake-robins spring up

in the pines, a cheerful crowd with white, pinktinted faces, rejoicing in the certainty of gladdening the eye and the heart of the rambler seeking them. The sweet-brier rose, or eglantine, here and there charily, and the more common wild-rose, everywhere generously, unfold their charms while the fervors of summer increase. The crimson pasture-lilies, with flecks of black within their cups, burn as so many thousand torches, not to consume or destroy all surrounding life, but to illuminate the broad and sober areas of close-cropped grass, ledges and boulders, interspersed with extensive divisions of densely growing huckleberry-shrubs and blackberry-vines. The pitcher-plant, in the wildest swamps, brings forth its superb gift, a beautifully fashioned pitcher, filled with water, in one hand, and a curiously constructed, splendid flower in the other. The cardinal lobelias, arrayed in scarlet, stand in line like red-coated soldiers on the brink of a brook, overtopped by a rear line of black alders. The contrast as seen across the brook is striking. But the eye is not always seeking such contrasts. It often turns from the scarletclad cardinals, though they exhibit their splendor all along the marge of a lakelet or stream, to examine the shy little blossoms which hide in the grass, or are content to share a lowly, unattractive spot with gravel and sand. The pimpernel, in a bare place by the sea, often overswept by the spray, never crowded by the flowers that love and cling

to fertile spots, that enjoy taking part in grand displays, lives to be useful as well as to adorn its sterile home. It is "the poor man's weather-glass," telling him when to close his doors and windows against the storm, and when to open them again for the free ingress of the beneficent sunshine, and of the breeze from the sea, redolent with brine. The modest bellworts of the wood, the simple blue-eyed grass of the swale, the humble primrose of the pasture, and many other common, lowly flowers, scattered over our sea-girdled territory, keep the florist busy in his charming pursuit, throughout the summer, and richly reward him for all his painstaking and study. The twin-flowers, both beautiful and sweet, are not the least attractive of the manifold wonders in the South Woods. Linnæa borealis,the union of the great botanist's love with the fairest hue of the northern sky, - how suitable a name for these flowers so charmingly disposed on the slender, creeping, trailing branches of an evergreen plant, which cover the roots of decaying stumps and little mossy mounds! The orchis, the iris, the water-lilies, as well as the earlier yellow lady's-slipper of June, and the taller, queenlier lady's-slipper of July, are soon followed by the autumnal flowers. Before the days of autumn come, or the reign of the dog-star ceases, the golden-rods begin to change from green into yellow, and earth and sea and sky to show premonishing signs of the nearness of September and October.

Group by group the autumnal flowers appear: the golden-rod with full and showy plumes in every part of the landscape; the asters, in their style as conspicuous and as abounding; the fall dandelions, sprinkled over all the acres from the hill-tops to the sea; all uniting with the ripening apples and pears of the orchards, the painted tupelo, ash, oak, walnut, birch, maple, and beech of the forest, the sumac, ivy, bramble, and woodbine of the less covered grounds; the barberry-bushes in clumps, on the knolls and slopes of the pastures and along by the walls, with depending clusters of blood-red berries; the sky and clouds, gorgeous with all the colors of the rainbow at every going-down of the sun, all uniting with these objects to give the last days of the harvest-season, ere they pass away, a sober but rich and befitting splendor. But even when the autumnal magnificence is with the past; when the November frosts have done on the hills and in the meadows their blighting and numbing work, and the sky is dun, and the earth is cold, now and then come days of golden sun and golden haze, when the rambler, beginning to climb through the beeches the northern slope of Pigeon Hill, sees the herb-robert still green and adorned with flowers just blown, on rough rocks deeply embedded in dead leaves; and making his way, afterwards, to the sea, he discovers on a low bush a "sweet single rose," and farther, on the "ocean's edge," a pimpernel of brightest dye.