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She crossed the breadth of the grounds under the heavy shade of arbutus trees with a hare's fleetness, and stood a second looking at the open windows and the terraces that lay before them, brightly lighted by the summer moon and by the lamps that sparkled among the shrubs.
In the central depths where the sun's rays never penetrated, and the fallen leaves lay so thickly on the ground, no flowers could grow, but on the outer edges spring lavished her treasures. The trailing arbutus added new fragrance to the perfumed air, frail anemones trembled in the wind, and violets flourished in the shade.
With the exception of a few berries, chiefly of a dwarf arbutus, the natives eat no vegetable food besides this fungus. In New Zealand, before the introduction of the potato, the roots of the fern were largely consumed; at the present time, I believe, Tierra del Fuego is the only country in the world where a cryptogamic plant affords a staple article of food.
Arbutus, fragrant with its clean, wholesome odors, gave forth its thousand dewy pink blossoms, and the trailing Linnea borealis hung its pendent twin bells round every mossy stump and old rock damp with green forest mould.
You may follow it, though the marks of Pilgrim feet are buried beneath city pavement, save perhaps on the crest of the hill itself, and though bluebird and robin flutter shyly to its upper end in spring as did their pilgrim fathers before them, the arbutus, from earliest days to this the Plymouth flower, no longer grows on its margin.
Awhile he spake and thought only of red deer and Indians; of the trillium that opened its white triangle in his shade; of the scented arbutus, fair as the pink ocean shell, weaving her fragrant mats in the moss at his feet; of feathery ferns, casting their silent shadows on the checkerberry leaves, and all those sweet, wild, nameless, half-mossy things, that live in the gloom of forests, and are only desecrated when brought to scientific light, laid out and stretched on a botanic bier.
But my queer, wild, clever Polly what a week we shall have with you presently! Now, who is that crying and sobbing in the dark?" The Doctor swooped suddenly down on a shadowy object, which lay prone under an arbutus shrub. "My dear little Firefly, what is the matter? You ought to be in bed ages ago out here in the damp and cold, and such deep-drawn sobs! What has nurse been about?
"Within the woods Tufts of ground-laurel, creeping underneath The leaves of the last summer, send their sweets Upon the chilly air, and by the oak, The squirrel cups, a graceful company, Hide in their bells, a soft aerial blue," ground-laurel being a local name for trailing arbutus, called also mayflower, and squirrel-cups for hepatica, or liver-leaf.
"Rough-leaf," said the Somewhere Man; "gravel-weed we call it in our country, because it marks the poorest soil." "Trailing arbutus," said the Anywhere Man; "May-flowers we call them in our country." "But why?" asked the Nowhere Man. "May has not yet come." "She is coming," answered the other; "she will be here before these are gone."
I wished the rocks, and the hanging-woods, and the glens, and the water-falls, and the arbutus, and the myrtles, and the upper and lower lakes, and the islands, and Mucruss, and Mucruss Abbey, and the purple mountain, and the eagle's nest, and the Grand Turk, and the lights and the shades, and the echoes, and, above all, the Lady Jocunda, fairly at the devil.
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