CHAPTER I.

A SPRING OPENING.

On that bright spring afternoon when three happy, interested children went off to the woods with their governess to take their first lesson in the study of wild flowers, they saw also some other things which made a fresh series of “Elmridge Talks,” and these things were found among the trees of the roadside and forest.

“What makes it look so yellow over there, Miss Harson?” asked Clara, who was peering curiously at a clump of trees that seemed to have been touched with gold or sunlight.  “And just look over here,” she continued, “at these pink ones!”

Malcolm shouted at the idea: 

“Yellow and pink trees!  That sounds like a Japanese fan.  Where are they, I should like to know?”

“Here, you perverse boy!” said his governess as she laughingly turned him around.  “Are you looking up into the sky for them?  There is a clump of golden willows right before you, with some rosy maples on one side.  What other colors can you call them?”

Malcolm had to confess that “yellow and pink trees” were not so wide of the mark, after all, and that they were very pretty.  Little Edith was particularly delighted with them, and wanted to “pick the flowers” immediately.

“They are too high for that, dear,” was the reply, “and these blossoms—­for that is what they really are, although nothing more than fringes and catkins—­are much prettier massed on the trees than they would be if gathered.  The still-bare twigs and branches seem, as you see, to be draped with golden and rose-colored veils, but there will be no leaves until these queer flowers have dropped.  If we look closely at the twigs and branches, we shall see that they are glossy and polished, as though they had been varnished and then brightened with color by the painter’s brush.  It is the flowing of the sap that does this.  The swelling of the bark occasioned by the flow of sap gives the whole mass a livelier hue; hence the ashen green of the poplar, the golden green of the willow and the dark crimson of the peach tree, the wild rose and the red osier are perceptibly heightened by the first warm days of spring.”

[Illustration:  Male catkin of willow.]

“Miss Harson,” asked Clara, with a perplexed face, “what are catkins?”

“Here,” said her governess, reaching from the top bar of the road-fence for the lowest branch of a willow tree; “examine this catkin for yourself, and I will tell you what my Botany says of it:  ’An ament, or catkin, is an assemblage of flowers composed of scales and stamens or pistils arranged along a common thread-like receptacle, as in the chestnut and willow.  It is a kind of calyx, by some classed as a mode of inflorescence (or flowering), and each chaffy scale protects one or more of the stamens or pistils, the whole forming one aggregate flower.  The ament is common to forest-trees, as the oak and chestnut, and is also found upon the willow and poplar.’”