The spring air affects us as it does the plants and wild creatures. We long to get away from school, and taking our lunches, to spend the delightful days wandering through the fields and woods. There is no place like the open country when all Nature is waking. We feel like running and frisking as the young lambs do.
Can it be wrong to gather all that we wish of the beautiful flowers with which the earth is carpeted? Has not Nature grown them in her great garden in such abundance that all we pick will make no difference to her? Let us go with the children on their rambles after flowers and learn if Nature does take any account of their innocent raids on her treasures.
Here is a party of children chasing across the fields. Each one is searching for the flowers that have bloomed since last they were out, and each is trying to get more than his companions. The children have learned that some kinds of flowers grow in the woods, others in the marshy places, and still others on the dry hillsides. They know where to go for each kind, and not a spot escapes their sharp search.
Here they find a patch of violets, and all are quickly picked. There are some baby-blue-eyes, and yonder dry field is brilliant with the colors of many others. In the gathering of the flowers some of them are pulled up by the roots, but the children do not think of the harm this does. They wander on and on until many have more in their hands than they can carry. Some of those picked first are already wilted, and, to make their burdens lighter, the children throw these away. At last a tired but happy band turns toward home.
What will be done with all the flowers that have been picked? In each home the vases are filled and the tables decorated. There is no room for all of them and some are thrown out. These flowers, once so fresh and bright as they nodded in the breeze, now lie crushed and wilted on the ground.
Another spring returns and the children are out again looking in the familiar places for the flowers they know so well. But there seems to be something wrong, for there are not so many as there used to be. The children have to go farther and search more carefully to get their arms full.
Still a third spring comes and the children are just as ready for the happy excursions and just as anxious to get the flowers. They hunt the fields over, but in the places where the flowers used to be so thick there are only a few scattering ones. They cannot understand what is wrong, but Nature could tell them if they would ask her. The year before she was short of seed, but this year it is much worse, for she had hardly any to plant in her garden. She is short of bulbs also, and of many other plants that grow from year to year, for the children carelessly pulled these up.
H. W. Fairbanks
Wild asters cover the mountain meadows.