Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/108

 you. The elecampane, that most peculiar of perennial herbs, is not a stranger to your roads and fields. Its odor is strong, acrid, penetrating; the slightest touch of it has an immediate and enduring effect. When you approach it, you must, willy-nilly, carry away with you some token of its love. And one of its idiosyncracies is that it only blossoms when the hills and fields are shorn of every other variety of flower. It is the message of Spring to Autumn—the billet doux, as it were, of May to September. It bursts with beautiful yellow flowers, to console the almost flowerless season. And when all the bushes and herbs of the Lebanon coppices and fields are glorying in their fragrance and beauty, the elecampane waves its mucilaginous and wilted branches in perfect self-satisfaction. But when Nature withholds her favors from the wild daughters of Spring, the flowering of the elecampane begins in good earnest. Ay, the life beautiful is not denied even this bold and ungainly plant, which is ubiquitous in these