ng in fertility after a manner of its own. If its
energies in the present instance happened to be devoted to ornament
rather than utility, it was not for an untaxed and disinterested
outsider to make complaint; least of all a man who was never a
wine-bibber, and who believes, or thinks he believes, in "art for art's
sake." Within the woods the ground was carpeted with trailing arbutus
and a profusion of checkerberry vines, the latter yielding a few fat
berries, almost or quite a year old, but still sound and spicy, still
tasting "like tooth-powder," as the benighted city boy expressed it. It
was an especial pleasure to eat them here in Dyer's Hollow, I had so
many times done the same in another place, on the banks of Dyer's Run.
Lady's-slippers likewise (nothing but leaves) looked homelike and
friendly, and the wild lily of the valley, too, and the pipsissewa.
Across the road from the old house nearest the ocean stood a still more
ancient-seeming barn, long disused, to all appearance, but with old
maid's pinks, catnip, and tall, stout pokeberry weeds yet flourishing
beside it. Old maid's pinks and catnip! Could that combination have been
fortuitous?

No botanist, nor even a semi-scientific lover of growing things, like
myself, can ever walk in new fields without an eye for new plants. While
coming down the Cape in the train I had seen, at short intervals,
clusters of some strange flower,--like yellow asters, I thought. At
every station I jumped off the car and looked hurriedly for specimens,
till, after three or four attempts, I found what I was seeking,--the
golden aster, _Chrysopsis falcata_. Here in Truro it was growing
everywhere, and of course in Dyer's Hollow. Another novelty was the pale
greenbrier, _Smilax glauca_, which I saw first on the hill at
Provincetown, and afterward discovered in Longnook. It was not abundant
in either place, and in my eyes had less of beauty than its familiar
relatives, the common greenbrier (cat-brier, horse-brier, Indian-brier)
of my boyhood, and the carrion flower. This glaucous smilax was one of
the plants that attracted Thoreau's attention, if I remember right,
though I cannot now put my finger upon his reference to it. Equally new
to me, and much more beautiful, as well as more characteristic of the
place, were the broom-crowberry and the greener kind of poverty grass
(_Hudsonia ericoides_), inviting pillows or cushions of which, looking
very much alike at a little distance, were