Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/183

Rh swamp where I had been accustomed to wander as a child, with no thought of finding anything new (as if there were not something new everywhere), I stopped before a bush bearing purple buds and clusters of dry capsules. The capsules might have been those of Andromeda, for aught I should have noticed, but the buds had a novel appearance and told a different story. Again I betook myself to the Manual, and lo! this bush, growing in the swamp that I should have thought I knew better than any other in the world, turned out to be another species—our only northern one—of Leucothoë. So I might have fitted name and thing together long ago, if I had kept my eyes open. As Hamlet said, "There's the rub." Keeping one's eyes open isn't half so easy as it sounds. Really, the bush is one that nobody except a botanist ever sees (which is the reason, doubtless, why it has no vernacular name); or if here and there a man does see it, it is sure to be in flowering time (in middle June), when he passes it by without a second glance as "high-bush blueberry." I am pleased to have it grow-