k for a new pleasure in early spring--the blooming of this
maple, with flowers so thoroughly distinct and so entirely beautiful.

[Illustration: "The Norway maple breaks into a wonderful bloom"]

The samaras to follow on this Norway maple are smaller than those of the
other two maples mentioned, and they hang together at a different angle,
somewhat more graceful. I have often wondered how the designers, who
work to death the pansies, the roses and the violets, have managed to
miss a form or "motive" of such value, suggesting at once the near-by
street and far-away Egypt.

[Illustration: Samaras of the sugar maple]

A purely American species, and one of as much economic importance as any
leaf-dropping tree, is the sugar maple, known also as rock maple--one
designation because we can get sweetness from its sap, the other
because of the hardness of its wood. The sugar maples of New England, to
me, are more individual and almost more essentially beautiful than the
famed elms. No saccharine life-blood is drawn from the elm; therefore
its elegance is considered. I notice that we seldom think much of beauty
when it attaches to something we can eat! Who realizes that the common
corn, the American maize, is a stately and elegant plant, far more
beautiful than many a pampered pet of the greenhouse? But this is not a
corn story--I shall hope to be heard on the neglected beauty of many
common things, some day--and we can for the time overlook the syrup of
the sugar maple for its delicate blossoms, coming long after the red and
the silver are done with their flowers. These sugar-maple blooms hang on
slender stems; they come with the first leaves, and are very different
in appearance from the flowers of other maples. The observer will have
no trouble in recognizing them after the first successful attempt, even
though he may be baffled in comparing the maple leaves by the apparent
similarity of the foliage of the Norway, the sugar and the sycamore
maples at certain stages of growth.

[Illustration: A mature sycamore maple]

After all, it is the autumn time that brings this maple most strongly
before us, for it flaunts its banners of scarlet and yellow in the
woods, along the roads, with an insouciant swing of its own. The sugar
possibility is forgotten, and it is a pure autumn pleasure to appreciate
the richness of color, to be soon followed by the more sober cognizance
of the elegance of outline and form disclosed when all the d