adows (in spite of their name,
these have been nothing but a pond for as long as I can remember), and I
stood awhile by the old Ross cellar, watching their evolutions. How
bright and cheery it was in the little sheltered clearing, with nothing
in sight but the leafless woods and the ice-covered pond! "Shan't I take
your coat?" the sun seemed to be asking. At my elbow stood a bunch of
lilac bushes ("laylocks" they were probably called by the man who set
them out[7]) that had blossomed freely in the summer. The house has
been gone for these thirty years or more (alas! my sun must be rapidly
declining when memory casts so long a shadow), but the bushes seem
likely to hold their own for at least a century. They might have
prompted a wise man to some wise reflections; but for myself, it must be
acknowledged, I fell instead to thinking how many half days I had
fished--and caught nothing, or next to nothing--along this same
pleasant, willow-bordered shore.

[7] So they were called, too, by that lover of flowers, Walter Savage
Landor, who, as his biographer says, followed a pronunciation
"traditional in many old English families."

In Norton pasture, an hour or two later, I made myself young again by
putting a few checkerberries into my mouth; and in a small new clearing
just over the brook ("Dyer's Run," this used to be called, but I fear
the name is falling into forgetfulness) I stumbled upon a patch of some
handsome evergreen shrub, which I saw at once to be a novelty. I took it
for a member of the heath family, but it proved to belong with the
hollies,--_Ilex glabra_, or ink-berry, a plant not to be found in the
county where it is my present lot to botanize. So, even on my native
heath, I had discovered something new.

The flora of a Massachusetts December is of necessity limited. Even in
the month under review, singularly favorable as it was, I found but
sixteen sorts of wild blossoms; a small number, surely, though perhaps
larger by sixteen than the average reader would have guessed. The names
of these hardy adventurers must by no means go unrecorded: shepherd's
purse, wild pepper-grass, pansy, common chickweed (_Stellaria media_),
mouse-ear chickweed (_Cerastium viscosum_), knawel, common mallow,
witch-hazel, cinque-foil (_Potentilla Norvegica_,--not _argentea_, as I
should certainly have expected), many-flowered aster, cone-flower,
yarrow, two kinds of groundsel, fall dandelion, and jointweed. Six of
these--mallow, c