were so familiar. Very few of us lived upon carpeted floors, but
soft green grass stretched away from our door-steps, all golden
with dandelions in spring. Those dandelion fields were like
another heaven dropped down upon the earth, where our feet
wandered at will among the stars. What need had we of luxurious
upholstery, when we could step out into such splendor, from the
humblest door?

The dandelions could tell us secrets, too. We blew the fuzz off
their gray beads, and made them answer our question, "Does my
mother want me to come home?" Or we sat down together in the
velvety grass, and wove chains for our necks and wrists of the
dandelion-sterns, and "made believe" we were brides, or queens,
or empresses.

Then there was the white rock-saxifrage, that filled the crevices
of the ledges with soft, tufty bloom like lingering snow-drifts,
our May-flower, that brought us the first message of spring.
There was an elusive sweetness in its almost imperceptible
breath, which one could only get by smelling it in close bunches.
Its companion was the tiny four-cleft innocence-flower, that
drifted pale sky-tints across the chilly fields. Both came to us
in crowds, and looked out with us, as they do with the small
girls and boys of to-day, from the windy crest of Powder House
Hill,--the one playground of my childhood which is left to the
children and the cows just as it was then. We loved these little
democratic blossoms, that gathered around us in mobs at our May
Day rejoicings. It is doubtful whether we should have loved the
trailing arbutus any better, had it strayed, as it never did,
into our woods.