As the man in the fable says of the chameleon,--"I have it yet, and can
produce it."

Now comes the marvel. The next winter L. went to New York for a year,
and wrote to me, as spring drew near, with solemn charge to visit his
favorite haunt and find another specimen. Armed with this letter of
introduction, I sought the spot, and tramped through and through its
leafy corridors. Beautiful wood-anemones I found, to be sure, trembling
on their fragile stems, deserving all their pretty names,--Wind-flower,
Easter-flower, Pasque-flower, and homeopathic Pulsatilla; rue-leaved
anemones I found also, rising taller and straighter and firmer in stem,
with the whorl of leaves a little higher up on the stalk than one
fancies it ought to be, as if there were a supposed danger that the
flowers would lose their balance, and as if the leaves must be all ready
to catch them. These I found, but the special wonder was not there for
me. Then I wrote to L. that he must evidently come himself and search;
or that, perhaps, as Sir Thomas Browne avers that "smoke doth follow the
fairest," so his little treasures had followed him towards New York.
Judge of my surprise, when, on opening his next letter, out dropped,
from those folds of metropolitan paper, a veritable double anemone. He
had just been out to Hoboken, or some such place, to spend an afternoon,
and, of course, his pets were there to meet him; and from that day to
this, I have never heard of the thing happening to any one else.

May-Day is never allowed to pass in this community without profuse
lamentations over the tardiness of our spring as compared with that
of England and the poets. Yet it is very common to exaggerate this
difference. Even so good an observer as Wilson Flagg is betrayed into
saying that the epigaea and hepatica "seldom make their appearance until
after the middle of April" in Massachusetts, and that "it is not unusual