Purple finches, a bit late in the season, are feeding on the seeds of the
big elm. The snows of late April and early May must have delayed their
journey northward. When the bird-designer made this bird he set out to
make a different kind of sparrow, but then had pity upon the amateur
ornithologist who finds the sparrows even now almost as difficult to
classify as the amateur botanists do their asters; so he dipped the bird
in some raspberry juice--John Burroughs says pokeberry juice--and the
finch came out of the dye with a wash of raspberry red on his head,
shoulders and upper breast, brightest on the head and the lower part of
his back. Otherwise he looks much like an English sparrow.

* * * * *

Now the belated April flowers are seen at their best, mingled with many
of the May arrivals. It is such a day as that when Bryant wrote "The Old
Man's Counsel." On the sloping hillsides, around the leafing hazel
"gay-circles of anemones dance on their stalks." In the more open places
the little wind flower, with its pretty leaves and solitary white
blossoms, blooms in cheerful companionship with its fellows, and the more
sterile parts of the hillside are snowed with the white plumes of the
plantain-leaved everlasting. Downy yellow violets and the common blue
violets grow everywhere and down on the sand near the river the birdfoot
violet, with its quaintly cut leaves and handsome blossoms grows
abundantly for the children who love to gather the "sand violets." On the
bottom which was flooded in March the satiny yellow flowers of the marsh
buttercup shine and the beautiful green of the uplands is spotted with
the pure gold of the buttercup. There is no longer need to be satisfied
with a few pretty flowers. May scatters her brightest and best in
abundance. On the rocky slopes the wild ginger shows its red-brown,
long-eared urns, the white baneberry its short white plumes, the