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Updated: June 21, 2025
Searchingly, at first suspiciously, then hesitatingly, with a return of the colour that came as easily as a prairie wind stirs the down of a milk-weed plant, Elizabeth Landor returned his look. It was an instinct that at last caused her eyes to drop. "No, I was not mistaken," she voiced. "How Landor is an Indian. It is he I meant."
There is also another plant, called Indian hemp, which is a small shrubby kind of milk-weed, that grows on gravelly islands. It bears white flowers, and the branches are long and slender; under the bark there is a fine silky thread covering the wood; this is tough, and can be twisted and spun into cloth. It is very white and fine, and does not easily break.
The lane, leading up to the house from the main road, climbed between a sloping buckwheat field on the one hand and a buttercupped meadow on the other. On either side of the lane, cutting it off from the fields, straggled a zigzag snake fence, with milk-weed, tansy, and mullein growing raggedly in its corners.
And it was no wonder that she wanted to get away from the crowd. She didn't even beg Betsy Butterfly's pardon for calling her a thief. But all the rest of the field people realized at last that Betsy was no thief. The butter-and-eggs plant, they were well aware, was as free as the clover, or the milk-weed blossoms, or any other of the wild flowers.
Singular to relate, it was once much admired as an article of female dress! Balloons were also very generally constructed from it. A better kind of material, it appears, was subsequently found in the down surrounding the seed-vessels of a plant vulgarly called euphorbium, and at that time botanically termed milk-weed.
At first sight, it looks like a tuft of grey lichens; but when closely examined, shows both care and skill in its construction, the outer wall being of fine bluish lichens cemented together, and the interior lined with the silken threads of the milk-weed, the velvety down of the tall mullein, or the brown hair-like filaments of the fern.
It runs whispering about, and wafts in all sorts of odors: honey of the milk-weed and wild rose, and a Christmas tang of the evergreens just below.
The pease and beans have long canoes, satin- lined and waterproof. On what voyage they are bound, I cannot say. The tall milk-weed that grew so fast all summer, and threatened to over- run the garden, now pays well for its lodging by the exquisite treasure which its rough-covered, pale-green bag holds.
We color the tiniest blades of grass and beds of strawberry leaves until the moss upon which they rest look like velvet with floss needlework. We polish the chestnuts till they appear as if carved of rosewood. We strip thistles of their prickly coat, and use the down for pillows. The milk-weed, as it ripens its silken-winged seeds, serves us for many beautiful purposes.
So she poked Jennie Junebug several times. But Jennie Junebug only stirred slightly and murmured something in her sleep. And seeing that it was useless to try to awaken her Mrs. Ladybug set out for the meadow alone. The sun hung low in the west when Mrs. Ladybug found Betsy Butterfly among a clump of milk-weed blossoms. But Mrs. Ladybug did not care what time it was.
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