enough. But did the rambler ever find the sensitive fern, which resented
the intrusive hand with all Mimosa's coyness? I never did but once. I
have wooed many a delicate frond of all varieties of fern since, but
never one so conscious. Now, too, ere the trees come into leaf, is the
time to seek the boxwood, called, I hope improperly, by the ominous name
of the Southern dogwood. It is worth an afternoon's ramble to come upon
one of those trees, standing in an open glade of the forest, a pyramid
of white or cream-colored blossoms. Before a leaf is on the tree, it
clothes itself in this lovely livery, and at a little distance seems
like a snowy cloud rather than a shrub.

But with June comes the most exquisite of our New England wild-flowers,
the arethusa, or swamp-pink, as it is often styled, to the great
confusion of its delicate, high-born nature with the great, vulgar,
flaunting azalea. When June comes,--when the clethra is heaped with its
bee-beloved blossoms, and the grass is green and bright as never again
in the year, then the arethusa is to be sought. A most unaccountable
flower, of all shades, from pale pink to a deep purple, with a lovely
shape that I can liken to nothing so nearly as the _fleur-de-lis_ on
French escutcheons, it has a delicate, yet powerful, aromatic scent, as
if it were an estray from the tropics. One specimen, snowy white, I have
seen, and can tell you where to find another. You are to go out along
the President's highway, due northward from a certain seaport of
Massachusetts. Take the eastward turn at the little village which lies
at the head of its harbor, and so north again by the old Friends'
meeting-house, which looks in brown placidity away toward the distant
shipping and the wicked steeple-houses, into the which so many of its
lost lambs have been inveigled. Then be not tempted to strike off down
yonder lane, to see the curious old farm-house, relic of Colony times,
with its odd stone chimney, its projecting upper story and carved wooden