this while
its production draws severely upon the strength of a plant. As good
fortune will have it, a great many flowers close to their pollen yield
an ample supply of nectar: a food esteemed delicious by the whole round
of insects, winged and wingless. While ants might sip this nectar of
ages without plants being any the better or the worse; a very different
result has followed upon the visits of bees, wasps, and other
hairy-coated callers. These, as they devour nectar, dust themselves with
the pollen near by. Yellowed or whitened with this freightage, moth and
butterfly, as they sail through the air, know not that they are
publishing the banns of marriage between two blossoms acres or, it may
be, miles apart. Yet so it is. Alighting on a new flower the insect rubs
a pollen grain on a stigma ready to receive it, and lo! the rites of
matrimony are solemnized then and there. Unwittingly the little visitor
has wrought a task bigger with fate than many an act loudly trumpeted
among the mightiest deeds of men! On the threshold of a Lady's Slipper a
bee may often be detected in the act of entrance. In the Sage-flower he
finds an anther of the stamen which, pivoted on its spring, dusts him
even more effectually.

[Illustration: Sage-flower and Bee]

Bountifully to spread a table is much, but not enough, for without
invitation how can hospitality be dispensed? To the feast of nectar the
blossoms join their bidding; and those most conspicuously borne and
massed, gayest of hue, richest in odor, secure most guests, and are
therefore most likely to transmit to their kind their own excellences as
hosts and entertainers. Thus all the glories of the blossoms have arisen
in doing useful work; their beauty is not mere ornament, but the sign
and token of duty well performed. Our opportunity to admire the radiancy
and perfume of a jessamine or a pond-lily is due to the previous
admiration of uncounted winged attendants. If a winsome maid adorns
herself with a wreath from the garden, and carries a posy gathered at
the brookside, it is for the second time that their charms are impressed
into service; for the flowers' own ends of attraction all their scent
and loveliness were called into being long before.

Let us put flowers of the blue flag beside those of the maple, and we
shall have a fair contrast between the brilliancy of blossoms whose
marrier has been an insect, and the dinginess of flowers indebted to the
services of the wind.