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"'Here, one of our women would say, 'am I to-day, unwed, as free of thought as yonder bird chasing the catkin down; tomorrow I shall be married, with a whole summer to make love in, relieved at one bound of all those uncertainties you acknowledge to, with nothing to do but lie about on sunny banks with him whom chance sends me, come to the goal of love without any travelling to get there. Why, you must acknowledge this is the perfection of ease."
If but one catkin opens anywhere within range, a bee is on hand that very hour to rifle it, and it is a most pleasing experience to stand near the hive some mild April day and see them come pouring in with their little baskets packed with this first fruitage of the spring.
The air was cold for all the sun shone, the smell of catkin pollen, bursting buds, and the odour of earth steaming in the sun, was in every breath; the blackbirds were calling, and the doves; the ganders looked longingly at the sky and screamed a call to every passing wild flock, and Deams' rooster wanted to fight all creation, if you judged by the boasting he was doing from their barnyard gate.
Sowerby praised the menu, Mr. Barmby, Peridon and Catkin named other dishes, there was the right after-dinner ring in Victor's ears, thanks to the woman of the world who had travelled round to nature and led the shackled men to deliver themselves heartily. One tap, and they are free. That is, in the moments after dinner, when nature is at the gates with them.
The scales of the flower-buds are somewhat gummy, but not nearly so much so as those of the leaf-buds. Within is the catkin. The leaf-scars are somewhat three-lobed on the young parts, with three dots, indicating the fibro-vascular bundles, which ran up into the leaf. The scars are swollen, making the young branches exceedingly rough. In the older parts the scars become less noticeable.
'Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and Catkin. Those two would have writhed like head and tail of a worm, at a division on the way to the station. Point a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through the body. They're a fabulous couple. Victor cut him short. 'I deny that those two are absurd. 'And Catkin's toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon. Nataly strongly denied it.
The catkins of the male flowers are yellowish; and being placed on slender shoots of the current year, near the extremity, twenty or thirty together, they form bundles, surmounted by some scarcely developed leaves. Each catkin is not more than half an inch long, on a very short peduncle, and with a rounded denticulated crest.
Peter Grimm was the one creature on the Place whom Lady feared. On the day after her arrival, she essayed to worry the haughty catkin. And, a second later, the puppy was nursing a brace of deep red scratches at the tip of her inquiring black nostrils. Thereafter, she gave Peter Grimm a wide berth. And the cat was wont to take advantage of this dread by making forays on Lady's supper dish.
Nataly smiled at her incorrigibly lagging intelligence of him, on hearing that he had invited a company: 'Lady Grace, for gaiety; Peridon and Catkin, fiddles; Dudley Sowerby and myself, flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by the dear old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage, as in old times; towers of Dieppe in the morning-light; and the lovely road to the capital!
Who has not admired the soft gray silky buds of the "pussy" willow, swelling with the spring's impulse, and ripening quickly into a "catkin" loaded with golden pollen?
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