unningly woven.
Their delicate, thread-like roots take no hold upon the earth tilled and
troubled by the fingers of man. The fine sap that steals through their
long, slender limbs pauses and fails when they are watered by human
hands. Silently the secret of their life retreats and shrinks away and
hides itself.

But in the woods, where falling leaves and crumbling tree-trunks and
wilting ferns have been moulded by Nature into a deep, brown humus,
clean and fragrant--in the woods, where the sunlight filters green
and golden through interlacing branches, and where pure moisture of
distilling rains and melting snows is held in treasury by never-failing
banks of moss--under the verdurous flood of the forest, like sea-weeds
under the ocean waves, these three little creeping vines put forth their
hands with joy, and spread over rock and hillock and twisted tree-root
and mouldering log, in cloaks and scarves and wreaths of tiny evergreen,
glossy leaves.

One of them is adorned with white pearls sprinkled lightly over its robe
of green. This is Snowberry, and if you eat of it, you will grow wise
in the wisdom of flowers. You will know where to find the yellow violet,
and the wake-robin, and the pink lady-slipper, and the scarlet sage, and
the fringed gentian. You will understand how the buds trust themselves
to the spring in their unfolding, and how the blossoms trust themselves
to the winter in their withering, and how the busy bands of Nature are
ever weaving the beautiful garment of life out of the strands of death,
and nothing is lost that yields itself to her quiet handling.

Another of the vines of the forest is called Partridge-berry. Rubies are
hidden among its foliage, and if you eat of this fruit, you will grow
wise in the wisdom of birds. You will know where the oven-bird secretes
her nest, and where the wood-cock dances in the air at night; the
drumming-log of the ruffed grouse will be easy to find, and you will
see the dark lodges of the evergreen thickets inhabited by hundreds
of warblers. There will be no dead silence for you in the forest, any
longer, but you will hear sweet and delicate voices on every side,
voices that you know and love; you will catch the key-note of the silver
flute of the woodthrush, and the silver harp of the veery, and the
silver bells of the hermit; and something in your heart will answer to
them all. In the frosty stillness of October nights you will see the
airy tribes flitting acro