tha
palustria, often known, less lovingly, as "blobs." The Caltha is
common to both Europe and America and, though it is often
hereabout known by the nickname of "cowslip" which the early
English settlers seem to have given it, I do not hear it called
mayflower. In localities where the arbutus is not common the name
mayflower is here most commonly given to the pink and white
Anemone nemorosa, the wind flower of the meadow margins and low
woods, and to the rock saxifrage, Saxifraga virginiensis, both of
which are among the earliest blossoms of the month.

None can visit Plymouth without wishing to climb the bold
promontory of "hither Manomet." The legend has it that Eric the
Red, the Viking who explored New England shores centuries before
the first Englishman heard of them, made this his burial hill and
that somewhere beneath its forests his bones lie to this day. I
sought long for mayflowers on the seaward slopes and in the rough
gullies of these "highlands of Plymouth," I did not find them
there.

On the landward slopes, gentler and less windswept, down toward
the "sweet waters" that flow from inland to the sea, you may with
patient search find many. But the heights shall reward you, if not
with mayflowers with greater and more lasting joys. The woods of
Manomet were full of butterflies. Splendid specimens of Vanessa
antiopa danced together by twos and threes in every sunny glade,
the gold edging of bright raiment showing beneath their "mourning
cloaks" of rich seal brown. Here in the rich sunshine Launcelot
might well have said:

Myself beheld three spirits, mad with joy,
Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower.

Here Grapta interrogationis carried his ever present question mark
from one dry leaf to another asking always that unanswerable
"why?" Here Pyrameis huntera, well named the hunter's butterfly,
flashed red through the woodland, scouting silently and becoming
invisible in ambush as a hunter should. Here a tiny fleck of sky,
the spirit bluebird of the spring which the entomologists have
woefully named Lycaema pseudargiolus, fluttered along the ground
as if a new born flower tried quivering flight, and brown
Hesperiidae, "bedouins of the pathless air," buzzed in vanishing
eccentricity. But it was not for these that I lingered long on the
seaward crest. There below me lay the bay that the exploring
Pilgrims entered at such hazard, that but the day before had been
blotted out with a freezing storm an