United States or Philippines ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Every land has its nightingale, if we only have the heart to hear him. How distinct his voice is how personal, how confidential, as if he had a message for us! There is a breath of fragrance on the cool shady air beside our little stream, that seems familiar. It is the first week of September. Can it be that the twin-flower of June, the delicate Linnaea borealis, is blooming again?
Finally, the procession reached the big, burnt mountain plain. The rocks had been stripped of the fine twin-flower creepers that once covered them; they had been robbed of the pretty silver moss and the attractive reindeer moss. Around the dark water gathered in clefts and hollows there was now no wood-sorrel.
"And need we ever grow old?" asked my lady Greygown, as she sat that evening with the twin-flower on her breast, watching the stars come out along the edge of the cliffs, and tremble on the hurrying tide of the river. "Must we grow old as well as gray?
Tookhees, the timid little wood mouse, who was digging under the moss for twin-flower roots to feed his little ones, had heard the enemy coming, and dove headlong into his hole, just in time to escape the snap of Kagax's teeth. That angered the fiery little weasel like poking a stick at him. To be caught napping, or to be heard running through the woods, is more than he can possibly stand.
If we can only come back to nature together every year, and consider the flowers and the birds, and confess our faults and mistakes and our unbelief under these silent stars, and hear the river murmuring our absolution, we shall die young, even though we live long: we shall have a treasure of memories which will be like the twin-flower, always a double blossom on a single stem, and carry with us into the unseen world something which will make it worth while to be immortal."
Maidenhair fern stood indubitably in several instances for the pubic hair, once surrounding a cluster of trailing arbutus when talcum powder of that fragrance had been used on the body. I dreamed of Linnaea borealis, the little twin-flower, in connection with a woman who a few days before when told of the birth of twins to a friend, said, "That is the way to have them come."
Over the mantelpiece hung a painting of the Bay of Genoa, which had accidentally found a voyage home in Zephaniah Pennel's sea-chest, and which skillful fingers had surrounded with a frame curiously wrought of moss and sea-shells. Two vases of India china stood on the mantel, filled with spring flowers, crowfoot, anemones, and liverwort, with drooping bells of the twin-flower.
Is it a mark of strength or of weakness? Which is nobler, to be true to one's ideal in spite of circumstances, or to conquer circumstances by suiting one's self to them? Who shall decide? Enough that the twin-flower and the star-flower each obeys its own law, and in so doing contributes each its own part toward making this world the place of diversified beauty which it was foreordained to be.
In a little while he was floating between dark walls of forest, through the heart of the wilderness. The night deepened around him and the sky hung out its thousand lamps. Odours of the woods floated on the air: the spicy fragrance of the firs; the breath of hidden banks of twin-flower. Muskrats swam noiselessly in the shadows, diving with a great commotion as the canoe ran upon them suddenly.
This grew in hiding, as one might say, in the shadow of its taller and showier neighbors. Not far off, but a little more within the wood, were patches of the linnæa, which had been at its prettiest in June, but even now, in late September, was still putting forth scattered blossoms. What should a man do? Discard the golden-rod for the gentian, and in turn forsake the gentian for the twin-flower?
Word Of The Day