nes are till you try them. Sometimes it is the large
white ones, sometimes the large purple ones, sometimes the small pink
ones. The odor is faint, and recalls that of the sweet violets. A
correspondent, who seems to have carefully observed these fragrant
hepaticas, writes me that this gift of odor is constant in the same
plant; that the plant which bears sweet-scented flowers this year will
bear them next.

There is a brief period in our spring when I like more than at any
other time to drive along the country roads, or even to be shot along
by steam and have the landscape presented to me like a map. It is at
that period, usually late in April, when we behold the first
quickening of the earth. The waters have subsided, the roads have
become dry, the sunshine has grown strong and its warmth has
penetrated the sod; there is a stir of preparation about the farm and
all through the country. One does not care to see things very closely:
his interest in nature is not special but general. The earth is coming
to life again. All the genial and more fertile places in the landscape
are brought out; the earth is quickened in spots and streaks; you can
see at a glance where man and nature have dealt the most kindly with
it. The warm, moist places, the places that have had the wash of some
building or of the road, or have been subjected to some special
mellowing influence, how quickly the turf awakens there and shows the
tender green! See what the landscape would be, how much earlier spring
would come to it, if every square yard of it was alike moist and
fertile. As the later snows lay in patches here and there, so now the
earliest verdure is irregularly spread over the landscape, and is
especially marked on certain slopes, as if it had blown over from the
other side and lodged there.

A little earlier the homesteads looked cold and naked; the old
farmhouse was bleak and unattractive; now Nature seems especially to
smile upon it; her genial influences crowd up around it; the turf
awakens all about as if in the spirit of friendliness. See the old
barn on the meadow slope; the green seems to have oozed out from it,
and to have flowed slowly down the hill; at a little distance it is
lost in the sere stubble. One can see where every spring lies buried
about the fields; its influence is felt at the surface, and the turf
is early quickened there. Where the cattle have loved to lie and
ruminate in the warm summer twilight, there the Apri