Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/187

Rh the only indigenous flower in bloom in this town at present, and probably I and my companion are the only men who have detected it this year. Yet this foreign fly has left its home, probably a mile off, and winged its way to this warm bank to find it. Six weeks hence children will set forth a-maying, and have indifferent luck. But the first sunny and warmer day in March the honey-bee comes forth, stretches its wings, and goes forth in search of the earliest flower.

March 18, 1861. When I pass by a twig of willow, though of the slenderest kind, rising above the sedge in some dry hollow, early in December or midwinter, above the snow, my spirits rise, as if it were an oasis in the desert. The very name, sallow (salix, from the Celtic sal-lis, near water), suggests that there is some natural sap or blood flowing there. It is a divining rod that has not failed, but stands with its root in the fountain. The fertile willow-catkins are those green caterpillar-like ones, commonly an inch or more in length, which develop themselves rapidly after the sterile yellow ones, which we had so admired, are fallen or effete. Arranged around the bare twigs, they often, form green wands from eight to eighteen inches long. A single catkin consists of from twenty-five to one hundred pods, more