the tender flowers and buds.

Warming with the sunshine and watering with the showers—that is Miss April making her flower garden grow.

MAY—PERFECTION OF BEAUTY

V. MAY—PERFECTION OF BEAUTY

Surely the poet sang truly. We would not forget Lowell’s challenge “What is so rare as a day in June,” but as we sit here on the top of a limestone cliff nearly a hundred feet above the bed of the creek, and watch the red sun brightening the gray of the eastern sky, while the robins and the meadow larks are singing joyous matins we steep our senses in the delicate colorings of earth and sky that signalize the awakening of another day and the real revival of another year. April was encouraging, but there were many bare boughs and many of the last year’s leaves still clung to the oaks and made a conspicuous feature of the landscape. The leafy month of June will show us more foliage, but it will be of a darker and more uniform shade of green. Now, as the sun rises higher and sends his rays through both the woodlands and the brushlands we thrill with delight at the kaleidoscope of color. There are no withered leaves to mar the beauty now. Seen in mass, and at a distance, the woodlands are a soft cinerous purple. But the tops, where the ruddy rays of the sun are glancing, are a hazy cloud of tender green, pink, yellow and pale purple. Nearer trees show in their opening leaves pale tints of the same gorgeous colors which we see in the fall. The maple keys and the edges of the tender leaves glow blood-red in the morning sun. The half-developed leaves of the birch and the poplar are a yellowish-green, not unlike the yellow which they show in autumn. The neatly plaited folds of the leaves of the oak display a greenish or cinerous purple, a soft and delicate presentment of the stronger colors which come in October, just as the overture gives us faint voicings of the beauty which the opera is to bring; just as Lowell’s organist gives us

The edge of the cliff is lined with shad-trees. Each twig is a plume of feathery dainty white The drooping racemes of white blossoms, with the ruby and early-falling bracts among them look like gala decorations to fringe the way of Flora as she travels up the valley. The shad-trees have blossomed rather late. In them and under them it is fully spring. There is a sound of bees and a sense of sweetness which make us forget all the cold days and think only of the glory of the coming summer. There comes a song sparrow and perches on one of the twigs. He throws back his little head, opens his mouth and pours forth a flood of melody. Next comes a myrtle warbler, eager to show us the yellow on his crown, on his two sides and the lower part of his back. He is one of the most abundant of the warblers and one of the most charming and fearless. He perches on a hop hornbeam tree from which the catkins have just shed their yellow pollen and goes over it somewhat after the manner of a chickadee or a nuthatch, showing us as he does so the white under his chin, the two heavy black marks below that, the two white cross bars on his wings, and his coat of slate color, striped and streaked with black. He goes over every twig of the little tree and then flies off to another, first pausing, however, to give his little call note “tschip, tschip” and then his little song, “Tschip-tweeter-tweeter.” A pair of kingfishers, showing their blue wings and splendid crests, fly screaming down the creek. Their nest is in a tunnel four feet in the clay banks on the opposite side.

Purple finches, a bit late in the season, are feeding on the seeds of the big elm. The snows of late April and early May must have delayed their journey northward. When the bird-designer made this bird he set out to make a different kind of sparrow, but then had pity upon the amateur ornithologist who finds the sparrows even now almost as difficult to classify as the amateur botanists do their asters; so he dipped the bird in some raspberry juice—John Burroughs says pokeberry juice—and the finch came out of the dye with a wash of raspberry red on his head, shoulders and upper breast, brightest on the head and the lower part of his back. Otherwise he looks much like an English sparrow.

Now the belated April flowers are seen at their best, mingled with many of the May arrivals. It is such a day as that when Bryant wrote “The Old Man’s Counsel.” On the sloping hillsides, around the leafing hazel “gay-circles of anemones dance on their stalks.” In the more open places the little wind flower, with its pretty leaves and solitary white blossoms, blooms in cheerful companionship with its fellows, and the more sterile parts of the hillside are snowed with the white plumes of the plantain-leaved everlasting. Downy yellow violets and the common blue violets grow everywhere and down on the sand near the river the birdfoot violet, with its quaintly cut leaves and handsome blossoms grows abundantly for the children who love to gather the “sand violets.” On the bottom which was flooded in March the satiny yellow flowers of the marsh buttercup shine and the beautiful green of the uplands is spotted with the pure gold of the buttercup. There is no longer need to be satisfied with a few pretty flowers. May scatters her brightest and best in abundance. On the rocky slopes the wild ginger shows its red-brown, long-eared urns, the white baneberry its short white plumes, the branchlets of the bladdernut are breaking into white clusters and columbine soon will “sprinkle on the rocks a scarlet rain” as it did in Bayard Taylor’s time, although the “scarlet rain,” like that of the painted cup in the lowlands, grows less and less each year. The white glory of the plum thickets at its height and the hawthornes, whose young leaves have been a picture of pink and red, will soon break into blossom and vie with the crabapple thickets in calling attention to the beauty of masses of color when arranged by the Master Painter.

The carpet of the woodlands grows softer and thicker, and more varied each day. Ferns and brakes are coming thickly. The flowers grow more splendid. The large, wholesome looking leaves of the blue bell are a fitting setting for the masses of bloom which show pink in the bud, then purple, and lastly a brilliant blue. Jack-in-the-pulpits make us smile with keen pleasure as memories of happy childhood days come crowding thickly upon us. The pretty pinnate leaves of the blue-flowered polemonium are sufficient explanation for the common name Jacobs-ladder, even though that name does not properly