Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/251

 *marked. It may be for the people of an elder race all other traces of whom are lost that the tiny, lovely flowers group their white and green, or for the humbler creatures of the wood who would otherwise lack tokens of mourning, but the smilacina certainly decorates the mounds in all woodlands with mystic tracings which have their own meaning. But it does more than this. In modest beauty it slips shyly out from the sheltering friendliness of the pines and stands with bowed head on many a dewy Memorial Day morning by such mounds as it may reach, in all gentle friendliness.

Shyer yet are the saxifrages which sometimes stand near by. These I have seen, clad as if in Confederate gray, by a mound which veterans had marked with a Union flag and along which tiny blue violets nestled lovingly. So, surely, they stand in mute respect and nestle as lovingly by many another spot where the remembered one fought as bravely beneath another flag. Long ago the good brown earth taught the blue and the gray to thus fraternize, and though we forgot it for a time the lesson came soon back to us with