into warm, sheltered, sunny nooks, you go upon your quest.  For the Mayflower, though found in almost every township in New England, has secret and unaccountable whims of its own,—­will persist in blooming in just one spot, where you ought not to expect it, and in avoiding all likely places.  Yet when you come to its traditionary habitat, it is not there.  Round and round we pace, hoping and despairing, till a faint, most delicate odor, indescribably suggestive of woodland freshness, catches the roused sense; or else one silvery star peeps out from under an upturned birch-leaf.  Then down on hands and knees; tear up brush to right and left, the brown skeletons of the withered foliage.  The ground is white with stars.  Some are touched with delicate pink, some creamy white,—­but all breathing out the evanescent secret of the early spring.  Such the children of Plymouth used to hang in garlands about the Pilgrim stone, in honor of the never-to-be-forgotten name of the New England Argo.

Later in the year come the beautiful blue violets, which are, I am sorry to say, scentless.  Yet their little white cousin, which delights in all swampy places, is sometimes, in the first days of its appearing, more regardful of the prime duty of all flowers.  I have gathered tufts of them which (botanists to the contrary notwithstanding) were wellnigh as odorous as if reared in the sunniest Warwickshire lane; but, as with a perfect specimen of the cast skin of a snake, such a boon is to be hoped for only once in a lifetime.  With the violets, the beautiful blush-bells of the anemone come garlanded with their graceful leaves, plentifully enough.  But did the rambler ever find the sensitive fern, which resented the intrusive hand with all Mimosa’s coyness?  I never did but once.  I have wooed many a delicate frond of all varieties of fern since, but never one so conscious.  Now, too, ere the trees come into leaf, is the time to seek the boxwood, called, I hope improperly, by the ominous name of the Southern dogwood.  It is worth an afternoon’s ramble to come upon one of those trees, standing in an open glade of the forest, a pyramid of white or cream-colored blossoms.  Before a leaf is on the tree, it clothes itself in this lovely livery, and at a little distance seems like a snowy cloud rather than a shrub.

But with June comes the most exquisite of our New England wild-flowers, the arethusa, or swamp-pink, as it is often styled, to the great confusion of its delicate, high-born nature with the great, vulgar, flaunting azalea.  When June comes,—­when the clethra is heaped with its bee-beloved blossoms, and the grass is green and bright as never again in the year, then the arethusa is to be sought.  A most unaccountable flower, of all shades, from pale pink to a deep purple, with a lovely shape that I can liken to nothing so nearly as the fleur-de-lis on French escutcheons, it has a delicate, yet powerful, aromatic scent, as if it were an estray from the tropics.