the tradition that Anemos, the wind, chose the delicate little flowers of
this family as the heralds of his coming in early spring. And in the
legend of Venus and Adonis the anemone is the flower that sprang from the
tears of the queen as she mourned the death of her loved one. Theocritus
put the wind-flowers into his Idylls, and Pliny said that only the wind
could open them. The Spring beauty has as rich a legend, for it was the
Indian Miskodeed, left behind when Peboan, the winter, the Mighty One,
was melted by the breath of spring. The toothwort (_dentaria laciniata_)
is sometimes known as the pepper-root, and every school boy and girl
living near the woods is familiar with the taste of its tubers and the
appearance of its cross-shaped flowers. The plumy dicentra, or Dutchman's
breeches, seems so feminine as to be grossly misnamed until we remember
that it was first discovered in the Rip Van Winkle country. The wild
ginger with its two large leaves and its queer little blossoms close to
the ground is another delight to the saunterer along the rocky slopes,
where the feathery shad-bush--the aronia of Whittier--with its wealth of
snowy blossoms and the wild plum not far away, with its masses of pure
white, are inspirations to clean and sweet lives, calling to mind the
lines of Wordsworth:

_One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can._

In rocky fields and hillsides and dry open woods, the dwarf everlasting
(_Antennaria plantaginifolia_) with its silvery-white little florets set
in delicate cups, is one of the first species of the great composite
family to bloom. We take it from between the rocks and think of those
lines of Tennyson, which John Fiske declared to be among the deepest