Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/104

90 the edge, but the less ground there is bare, the more we make of it. Such a day as this I resort where the partridges, etc., do, to the bare ground and the sheltered sides of woods and hills, and there explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants while the storm lowers overhead, and I forget how the time is passing. If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage, thus browsing along the edge of some near wood which would scarcely detain you at all in fair weather, and you will get as far away there as at the end of your longest fair-weather walk, and come home as if from an adventure. There is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture out. I go looking for green radical leaves. What a dim and shadowy existence have now to our memories the fair flowers whose localities they mark! How hard to find any trace of their stem now after it has been flattened under the snows of the winter. I go feeling with wet and freezing fingers amid the withered grass and the snow for their prostrate stems that I may reconstruct the plant. But greenness so absorbs my attention that sometimes I do not see