We climb the slope again and pause in front of a big sugar maple, a
rather rare sight hereabouts. The sap-sucker has bored a row of fresh
holes in the bark of the tree and the syrup has flowed out so freely that
the whole south side of the tree is wet with it. Scores of wasps, bees
and flies of all sizes and colors are revelling in the sweetness.

Finally we come to where there is less grass but more dead leaves and
leaf mould, and here is the first real herbaceous flower of this spring,
the dwarf white trillium, or wake-robin. How beautiful it looks, its
three pure, waxy-white petals, its six golden anthers and three long
styles, and its pretty whorl of three ovate leaves, at the summit of a
stem about four inches high. A little farther and we find a group of them
and then other clusters, fresh and pure and sweet enough to make a
bouquet for Euphrosyne.

Oh, but someone says, the hepatica is the first flower of spring; all the
nature writers say so. Well, but they don't seem to say much about the
trillium; possibly they haven't found it so often. Indeed, it seems to be
more choice of its location. It is hardly ever, perhaps it would be safe
to say never, found on a southern or a southwestern slope. Almost
invariably it is found on the steep slope of a river bank, facing
northeast or east. Hepaticas nearly always grow on the same slope, but
they come into blossom about two days later than the trillium. But on
another bank which faces the noon and the afternoon sun the hepaticas are
up with the trilliums in the calendar of spring. This year the trillium
was found blooming, on a northeastern slope, March 24. At this place the
hepatica did not bloom until March 26. But it bloomed March 24, on a
southwest slope, fifteen miles away.

By-the-way, the list of March blooming plants for 1908, is probably one