orderly and so certain; but wild flowers I love, just because there
is so much chance about them. Nature is all in favour of certainty
in great laws and of uncertainty in small events. You cannot
appoint the day and the place for her flower-shows. If you happen
to drop in at the right moment she will give you a free admission.
But even then it seems as if the table of beauty had been spread for
the joy of a higher visitor, and in obedience to secret orders which
you have not heard.

Have you ever found the fringed gentian?


"Just before the snows,
There came a purple creature
That lavished all the hill:
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.

The frosts were her condition:
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North evoked her,--
'Creator, shall I bloom?'"


There are strange freaks of fortune in the finding of wild flowers,
and curious coincidences which make us feel as if some one were
playing friendly tricks on us. I remember reading, one evening in
May, a passage in a good book called THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS,
in which Colonel Higginson describes the singular luck that a friend
of his enjoyed, year after year, in finding the rare blossoms of the