I must not forget to mention the many springs with which this whole region is supplied, each the centre of some wild nook, perhaps the head of a little valley one or two hundred yards long, through which one catches a glimpse, or hears the voice, of the main creek rushing along below.

My walks tend in this direction more frequently than in any other.  Here the boys go, too, troops of them, of a Sunday, to bathe and prowl around, and indulge the semi-barbarous instincts that still lurk within them.  Life, in all its forms, is most abundant near water.  The rank vegetation nurtures the insects, and the insects draw the birds.  The first week in March, on some southern slope where the sunshine lies warm and long, I usually find the hepatica in bloom, though with scarcely an inch of stalk.  In the spring runs, the skunk cabbage pushes its pike up through the mould, the flower appearing first, as if Nature had made a mistake.

It is not till about the 1st of April that many wild flowers may be looked for.  By this time the hepatica, anemone saxifrage, arbutus, houstonia, and bloodroot may be counted on.  A week later, the claytonia or spring beauty, water-cress, violets, a low buttercup, vetch, corydalis, and potentilla appear.  These comprise most of the April flowers, and may be found in great profusion in the Rock Creek and Piny Branch region.

In each little valley or spring run, some one species predominates.  I know invariably where to look for the first liverwort, and where the largest and finest may be found.  On a dry, gravelly, half-wooded hill-slope the bird’s-foot violet grows in great abundance, and is sparse in neighboring districts.  This flower, which I never saw in the North, is the most beautiful and showy of all the violets, and calls forth rapturous applause from all persons who visit the woods.  It grows in little groups and clusters, and bears a close resemblance to the pansies of the gardens.  Its two purple, velvety petals seem to fall over tiny shoulders like a rich cape.

On the same slope, and on no other, I go about the 1st of May for lupine, or sun-dial, which makes the ground look blue from a little distance; on the other or northern side of the slope, the arbutus, during the first half of April, perfumes the wildwood air.  A few paces farther on, in the bottom of a little spring run, the mandrake shades the ground with its miniature umbrellas.  It begins to push its green finger-points up through the ground by the 1st of April, but is not in bloom till the 1st of May.  It has a single white, wax-like flower, with a sweet, sickish odor, growing immediately beneath its broad leafy top.  By the same run grow watercresses and two kinds of anemones,—­the Pennsylvania and the grove anemone.  The bloodroot is very common at the foot of almost every warm slope in the Rock Creek woods, and, where the wind has tucked it up well with the coverlid of dry leaves, makes its appearance