Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/71

 grasses. The gerardia might very well explain all this if it would, but it is born close-mouthed. If you will look at the yellow buds which later open into the golden bells into which the bumble-bees love to scramble, bumbling as they go, you will see how tightly their lips are pressed together. No word can you get from these by the most insistent questioning, and even when they open it is easy to see that they have learned that silence is golden.

The Baltimore butterfly, wearing Lord Baltimore's colors of orange and black, is a common visitant to these meadows, too. He loves to tipple the lees of the milkweed blooms, but he does not frequent the meadow for that. It is because along its shoreward edges where the cool water oozes from black mud grows his home plant, the turtle-*head. On this he was born and to it he goes for the housing and feeding of his children. Like Gerardia flava, Chelone glabra is close-mouthed, but its silence is a wan white one which only blushes pink with embarrassment when questioned, but yields no reply. You cannot learn any mysteries of the meadow from these.