ok for wild roses or the
sweetbrier; its recurving or climbing stem, its glossy, deep-green,
heart-shaped leaves, its clustering umbels of small greenish-yellow
flowers, making it very pleasing to the eye; but to examine it closely
one must positively hold his nose. It would be too cruel a joke to
offer it to any person not acquainted with it to smell. It is like the
vent of a charnel-house. It is first cousin to the trilliums, among
the prettiest of our native wild flowers, and the same bad blood crops
out in the purple trillium or birthroot.

Nature will include the disagreeable and repulsive also. I have seen
the phallic fungus growing in June under a rosebush. There was the
rose, and beneath it, springing from the same mould, was this
diabolical offering to Priapus. With the perfume of the roses into the
open window came the stench of this hideous parody, as if in mockery.
I removed it, and another appeared in the same place shortly
afterward. The earthman was rampant and insulting. Pan is not dead
yet. At least he still makes a ghastly sign here and there in nature.

The good observer of nature exists in fragments, a trait here and a
trait there. Each person sees what it concerns him to see. The
fox-hunter knows pretty well the ways and habits of the fox, but on
any other subject he is apt to mislead you. He comes to see only fox
traits in whatever he looks upon. The bee-hunter will follow the bee,
but lose the bird. The farmer notes what affects his crops and his
earnings, and little else. Common people, St. Pierre says, observe
without reasoning, and the learned reason without observing. If one
could apply to the observation of nature the sense and skill of the
South American _rastreador_, or trailer, how much he would track home!
This man's eye, according to the accounts of travelers, is keener than
a hound's scent. A fugitive can no more elude him than he can elude
fate. His perceptions are said to be so keen that the displacement of
a leaf or pebble, or the bending down of a spear of grass, or the
removal of a little dust from the fence are enough to give him the
clew. He sees the half-obliterated footprints of a thief in the sand,
and carries the impression in his eye till a year afterward, when he
again detects the same footprint in the suburbs of a city, and the
culprit is tracked home and caught. I knew a man blind from his youth
who not only went about his own neighborhood without a guide, turning
up to