rembling
on their fragile stems, deserving all their pretty names,--Wind-flower,
Easter-flower, Pasque-flower, and homeopathic Pulsatilla; rue-leaved
anemones I found also, rising taller and straighter and firmer in stem,
with the whorl of leaves a little higher up on the stalk than one
fancies it ought to be, as if there were a supposed danger that the
flowers would lose their balance, and as if the leaves must be all ready
to catch them. These I found, but the special wonder was not there for
me. Then I wrote to L. that he must evidently come himself and search;
or that, perhaps, as Sir Thomas Browne avers that "smoke doth follow the
fairest," so his little treasures had followed him towards New York.
Judge of my surprise, when, on opening his next letter, out dropped,
from those folds of metropolitan paper, a veritable double anemone. He
had just been out to Hoboken, or some such place, to spend an afternoon,
and, of course, his pets were there to meet him; and from that day to
this, I have never heard of the thing happening to any one else.

May-Day is never allowed to pass in this community without profuse
lamentations over the tardiness of our spring as compared with that
of England and the poets. Yet it is very common to exaggerate this
difference. Even so good an observer as Wilson Flagg is betrayed into
saying that the epigaea and hepatica "seldom make their appearance until
after the middle of April" in Massachusetts, and that "it is not unusual
for the whole month of April to pass away without producing more than
two or three species of wild-flowers." But I have formerly found the
hepatica in bloom at Mount Auburn, for three successive years, on the
twenty-seventh of March; and last spring it was actually found, farther
inland, where the season is later, on the seventeenth. The May-flower is
usually as early, though the more gradual expansion of the buds renders
it less easy to give dates. And there are nearly twenty species which I
have noted, for five or six years together, as found before May-Day, and
which may therefore be properly assigned to April. The list includes
bloodroot, cowslip, houstonia, saxifrage, dandelion, chickweed,
cinquefoil, strawberry, mouse-ear, bellwort, dog's-tooth violet, five
species of violet proper, and two of anemone. These are all common
flowers, and easily observed; and the catalogue might be increased by
rare ones, as the white corydalis, the smaller yellow violet, (_V.
rotun