here the light glances
from glossy leaf tips. The later spring growth will fleck the bogs
with greens, but the maroon background will still be there.

[Illustration: Leyden Street To-day from Burial Hill]

The arbutus does not trail in all spots beneath the oaks, even in
this secluded wilderness. Sometimes one thinks he sees broad
stretches green with its rounded leaves only to find last year's
checkerberries grinning coral red at him, instead of the soft pink
tints and spicy odor of the Epigaea blooms. Sometimes the pyrola
simulates it and cracks the gloss on its leaves with a wan
wintergreen smile at the success of the deception. But after a
little the eye learns to discriminate in winter greens and to know
the outline of the arbutus leaf and its grouping from that of the
others. Then success in the hunt should come rapidly. After all
Epigaea and Gaultheria are vines closely allied, and it is no
wonder that there is a family resemblance. The checkerberry's
spicy flavor permeates leaves, stem and fruit. That of the arbutus
seems more volatile and ethereal. It concentrates in the blossom
and lifts from that to course the air invisibly an aromatic
fragrance that the little winds of the woods sometimes carry far
to those who love it, over hill and dale. Given a day of bright
sun and slow moving soft air and one may easily hunt the Plymouth
mayflower by scent. Even after the grouped leaves are surely
sighted the flowers are still to be found. The winds of winter
have strewn the ground deep with oak leaves and half buried the
vines in them for safety from the cold. Out from among these the
blossoms seem to peer shyly, like sweet little Pilgrim children,
ready to draw back behind their mother's aprons if they do not
like the appearance of the coming stranger. Perhaps they do
withdraw at discretion, and this is very likely why some people
who come from far to hunt find many mayflowers, while others get
few or none.

Just as the Mayflower in which the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth
seems to have been but one of many English ships of that name, so
the trailing arbutus is not the only flower to be called mayflower
in New England. The mayflower of the English fields and hedgerows
was preeminently the hawthorn, known often just as "the may." But
there is a species of bitter cress in England with showy flowers,
Cardamine pratensis, which is also called mayflower and the name
is given to the yellow bloom of the marsh marigold, Cal