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But I confess that at the moment I had no eyes for the scene for the yellow mary-buds, the blue of the wild hyacinth, or the white stars of the wind-flowers; for leaf and shade, and all the enchantment of the woodland. In brief, I was famished, and would have given a gold Henri to have seen a signboard swinging in the air. And, besides, it was dawning upon me that somehow we had missed the track.

"Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes; With everything that pretty bin, My lady sweet, arise! Arise, arise!"

Toward the end of the month, when the gelatinous masses in the water courses have developed the little black dots sufficiently so that we can see they are tadpoles, when the songsters have been joined by the catbird, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the woodthrush, the whippoorwill, the cheerful and friendly chewink and several of the warblers and flycatchers, the rivers and creeks will be fringed with the brilliant yellow of the marsh marigold, and we shall think of Shakespeare, walking the meadows of Avon, getting material for that song of the musicians in Cymbeline: And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes.

And winking mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes; With every thing that pretty bin, My lady sweet arise! Indeed, the whole country about here is poetic ground: everything is associated with the idea of Shakespeare.

Even in Rasselas, his great work of fiction, he speaks of passing through the fields and seeing the animals around him; but he does not mention definite trees, flowers, or animals. Shakespeare's wounded stag or "winking Mary-buds" would have given a touch of life to the whole scene. Johnson's latest and greatest work, Lives of the English Poets, is comparatively free from most of these faults.

The Broad, always one of the prettiest points in the landscape, was to-day in one of its most interesting phases. The sloping banks were golden with globe-flowers and marsh "mary-buds," and round the margin, was a broad belt of silver where the starry white ranunculus grew.