The Spring of the Year

beast that brings your spring? What sight or sound or

every time I have had a spring. Perhaps it is the arbutus, or the hepatica, or the pussy-willow, or the bluebird, or

e. It may snow again before night: no matter; your messenger has brought you the news, brought you the very sprin

d still lie s

r dread a

e skies a bl

ring i

here, if the blueb

ch day he drops down out of the blue sky, saying softly, sweetly, "Florida, florida!" as if calling the flowers; and then he is gone!-gone for d

ust as you must grow cucumbers in a hothouse if you want them ahead of time. But there comes a day when cucumbers will grow out of doors; and

nowadays it is the shadbush: I have no sure settled spring until I see the shadbush beginning to open misty white in the edge of the woods. Then I can trust the weather; I can open my beehives; I can p

'chi-er ca-na-den'sis! But that does not matter either. For this is not a botany lesson. It is an account of how springtime comes to me, and when and what are its signs. And I would have you read

e the wealth of the Indies, must carry out some kind of wealth in exchange. So you who would enjoy or understand what my shadbush means to me must have a

her did they not see the spring hats in the milliner's window or feel the need of a change of coat. I hope you are not one of them. I hope you are on th

r face with spring; the swelling buds on the maples, the fuzzy kittens on the pussy-willows, the opening marsh-marigolds in the meadows, the frogs, the bluebirds-all of these, while they stay, are the spring. But they are not sure to stay over night, here i

t. They are only banked in the winter, smouldering always under the snow, and quick to brighten and burst into blaze. There comes a warm day in January, and across your thawing path crawls a woolly-bear caterpillar; a mourning-cloak butterfly flits through the woods, and the juncos sing. That night a how

t grass. They wash the field to its borders in their delicate azure hue. At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my memory, too, swing wide open, and I am a boy again in the meadows of my old home. The shadbush is in blossom, and the fish are running-the sturgeon up the Delaware; the shad up Cohansey Creek; and through the Lower Sluice, these soft, stirring nights, the catfish

wimming in from the sea, the birds flying up from the South, the flowers opening fresh from the soil, the insects coming