and droop along those tarry slopes, as I have seen it on how many hill-side pastures!  But this may have been only a transitory response to the cricket, and I cannot promise the visitor to the Roof Garden that he will find golden-rod there every night.  I believe there is always Golden Seal, but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of “deep, cool, moist woods,” where Mrs. Creevey describes it as growing, along with other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and Dwarf Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman’s breeches, and Pearlwort, and Wood-sorrel, and Bishop’s—­cap, and Wintergreen, and Indian-pipe, and Snowberry, and Adder’s-tongue, and Wakerobin, and Dragon-root, and Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which must have got their names from some fairy of genius.  I should say it was a female fairy of genius who called them so, and that she had her own sex among mortals in mind when she invented their nomenclature, and was thinking of little girls, and slim, pretty maids, and happy young wives.  The author tells how they all look, with a fine sense of their charm in her words, but one would know how they looked from their names; and when you call them over they at once transplant themselves to the depths of the dells between our sky-scrapers, and find a brief sojourn in the cavernous excavations whence other sky-scrapers are to rise.

II.

That night on the Roof Garden, when the cricket’s cry flowered the dome with golden-rod, the tall stems of rye growing among the orchestra sloped all one way at times, just like the bows of violins, in the half-dollar gale that always blows over the city at that height.  But as one turns the leaves of Mrs. Creevey’s magic book-perhaps one ought to say turns its petals—­the forests and the fields come and make themselves at home in the city everywhere.  By virtue of it I have been more in the country in a half-hour than if I had lived all June there.  When I lift my eyes from its pictures or its letter-press my vision prints the eidolons of wild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of the sun against the air after dwelling on his brightness.  The rose-mallow flaunts along Fifth Avenue and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the house fronts on the principal cross streets; and I might think at times that it was all mere fancy, it has so much the quality of a pleasing illusion.

Yet Mrs. Creevey’s book is not one to lend itself to such a deceit by any of the ordinary arts.  It is rather matter of fact in form and manner, and largely owes what magic it has to the inherent charm of its subject.  One feels this in merely glancing at the index, and reading such titles of chapters as “Wet Meadows and Low Grounds”; “Dry Fields—­Waste Places —­Waysides”; “Hills and Rocky Woods, Open Woods”; and “Deep, Cool, Moist Woods”; each a poem in itself, lyric or pastoral, and of a surpassing opulence of suggestion.  The spring and, summer months pass in stately processional through the book, each with her fillet inscribed with the names of her characteristic flowers or blossoms, and brightened with the blooms themselves.