United States or Mayotte ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It plays no great part in this story, except that it was the cause of my obtaining a glimpse of Peter's private correspondence. For, after the Captain had discharged his gun at a hedge and made a large rabbit-burrow in it, Peter proceeded to pick up the cartridge-cases, which lay thick as catkins. This interested me, as Peter already had a pocketful. "What do you want all those for, Major Peter?"
Little Edith was particularly delighted with them, and wanted to "pick the flowers" immediately. "They are too high for that, dear," was the reply, "and these blossoms for that is what they really are, although nothing more than fringes and catkins are much prettier massed on the trees than they would be if gathered.
The Lepidodendra were shrubs and trees which put one more in mind of an Araucaria than of any other familiar plant; and the ends of the fruiting branches were terminated by cones, or catkins, somewhat like the bodies so named in a fir, or a willow.
Peculiarly graceful are these great bloom heads, high in the air, and standing nearly erect, instead of hanging down as do the catkins of the poplars and the birches. The odor of the chestnut flower is heavy, and is best appreciated far above in the great tree, where it may mingle with the warm air of June, already bearing a hundred sweet scents.
"Come forth, come forth!" the returning birds shout from out the bushes, and silver-grey catkins sprout on every twig. Beech leaves burst off their sharp, brown sheaths and open to the light, as soft as taffety and as green as emeralds. The other trees follow the example, and so teach their boughs to make a leafy shade against the sun as it mounts higher.
"Yes, it means trees which produce their flowers in catkins, or looking as if strung on long drooping stems; and the oak is the monarch of this family, and in Great Britain of all the forest-trees. It is especially an English tree, although our woods contain several varieties. But they do not hold the pre-eminence in our forests that the oaks do in those of England.
The Lepidodendra were shrubs and trees which put one more in mind of an Araucaria than of any other familiar plant; and the ends of the fruiting branches were terminated by cones, or catkins, somewhat like the bodies so named in a fir, or a willow.
The search seemed vain, until a glint of yellow just ahead, too deep to proceed from the spice-bush I was expecting to find, drew me to the very edge of the water, there to see hanging over and reflected in the stream a mass of golden catkins.
In sheltered corners of that truculent instrument for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few among the many begin to grow the violets of tender sentiment, the early greens of yearning. The poet feels the sap of the new year before the marsh-willow. He blossoms in advance of the catkins. Man is greater than Nature. The poet is greater than man: he is nature on two legs, ambulatory.
Many a time have I gone to the woods in the spring, when the willow catkins in the swamp and along the side of the creek turned from silver to gold, and when the clusters of linwort nodded above the purple-green leaves in the April wind, and taken the bark in long strips from the elm trees to reseat the dilapidated chairs.
Word Of The Day