Riverby

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John Burroughs. Riverby

I. AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS

II. THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS

III. BIRDS' EGGS

IV. BIRD COURTSHIP

V. NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE

VI. EYE-BEAMS

VII. A YOUNG MARSH HAWK

VIII. THE CHIPMUNK

IX. SPRING JOTTINGS

X. GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE

XI. A LIFE OF FEAR

XII. LOVERS OF NATURE

XIII. A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS

XIV. IN MAMMOTH CAVE

XV. HASTY OBSERVATION

XVI. BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE

XVII. THE WAYS OF SPORTSMEN

XVIII. TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS

Отрывок из книги

Nearly every season I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist. One likes to have his floral acquaintances come to him easily and naturally, like his other friends. Some pleasant occasion should bring you together. You meet in a walk, or touch elbows on a picnic under a tree, or get acquainted on a fishing or camping-out expedition. What comes to you in the way of birds or flowers, while wooing only the large spirit of open-air nature, seems like special good fortune. At any rate, one does not want to bolt his botany, but rather to prolong the course. One likes to have something in reserve, something to be on the lookout for on his walks. I have never yet found the orchid called calypso, a large, variegated purple and yellow flower, Gray says, which grows in cold, wet woods and bogs, – very beautiful and very rare. Calypso, you know, was the nymph who fell in love with Ulysses and detained him seven years upon her island, and died of a broken heart after he left her. I have a keen desire to see her in her floral guise, reigning over some silent bog, or rising above the moss of some dark glen in the woods, and would gladly be the Ulysses to be detained at least a few hours by her.

I will describe her by the aid of Gray, so that if any of my readers come across her they may know what a rarity they have found. She may be looked for in cold, mossy, boggy places in our northern woods. You will see a low flower, somewhat like a lady's-slipper, that is, with an inflated sac-shaped lip; the petals and sepals much alike, rising and spreading; the color mingled purple and yellow; the stem, or scape, from three to five inches high, with but one leaf, – that one thin and slightly heart-shaped, with a stem which starts from a solid bulb. That is the nymph of our boggy solitudes, waiting to break her heart for any adventurous hero who may penetrate her domain.

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Of such is the marsh marigold, giving a golden lining to many a dark, marshy place in the leafless April woods, or marking a little watercourse through a greening meadow with a broad line of new gold. One glances up from his walk, and his eye falls upon something like fixed and heaped-up sunshine there beneath the alders, or yonder in the freshening field.

In a measure, the same is true of our wild sunflowers, lighting up many a neglected bushy fence-corner or weedy roadside with their bright, beaming faces. The evening primrose is a coarse, rankly growing plant; but, in late summer, how many an untrimmed bank is painted over by it with the most fresh and delicate canary yellow!

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