Woodland Paths

by Winthrop Packard

The path that I take to my southerly looking masthead soon leaves the gerardias behind. They need alluvium and a certain fertility and moisture, and the crevices of the rock are not for them. There as I climb among the cedars I pass the withered stalks of the saxifrage that a month ago made the crevices white. Now only an occasional belated blossom, scraggly and worn as if with dissipation, seems hastening to reach oblivion with its fellows.

But the wild columbine still holds horns of honey plenty for the sipping of moth and butterfly, whose proboscides are long enough to reach the ultimate tip where it is stored. You may have a mouthful of honey if you will bite off the tiny bulbs at the very ends of these cornucopias,—a honey that has a fragrant sweetness that is unsurpassed in flavor. Nor are the bees behind you in knowledge. They may not reach the honey through the mouth of the horn, but they, too, can bite, and many a flower shows it, now that their season is passing. Their coral red and yellow glows with a rich radiance in the dusk under the cedars, and they have climbed far higher than the gerardias.

With the columbine, right up onto the very ledges themselves, have come the barberry bushes. They must have seen the summer coming, and they were the first to pass the hint on to me, for they have hung themselves with all the gold in their jewel boxes, pendant racemes of exquisite jewel work everywhere, their sprays of tender green grouping and swaying in the wind, nodding and smiling, decked with earrings, brooches, bracelets, and beads, all cunningly wrought of solid gold. Barberry bushes love the rough pasture and even these rougher rocks, yet they bring to them only grace and elegance and refinement, and receive no hint of uncouthness or barbarity from their surroundings.

These and a score of other herbs and shrubs clamber blithely upward and clothe the rocky hillside with beauty, but the queen of the place is the flowering dogwood. No other shrub has such airy blitheness of decorative beauty. There is something about the set of the leaves that suggests green-clad sprites about to dance for joy, but now every dainty branch is as if thronged with white butterflies, poising for flight. No other plant shows such a spirituality of delight as this now that it knows that the summer is here. On the plain below the poplars shimmer and quiver translucent green in the ecstasy of young leaves all tremulous with happiness and the tingle of surgent sap. Yet neither tree nor shrub nor any flowering herb seems to so stand on tiptoe for a flight into the blue heaven above, blossom and leaf and branch and trunk, as does this dainty delight of the shady hillside, the flowering dogwood.

The summer does not explode as does the spring. The spring promises and delays, approaches and withdraws, coquettes until we are in despair, then suddenly swoops upon us and smothers in the delight of her full presence. But the summer comes genially and graciously forward, announced by a thousand heralds. To-day you could not find on hillside or in lowland a spot that did not glow with the fact. On a bare ledge, where the gnarled cedars have held the rim of the hill all winter long against the gales and zero weather, I thought I might find a pause in the universal story. Here should be only gray rock and a rim of brown cedars, as much the furniture of winter as of summer. But I had forgotten the outlook.

On the fields far below, the tall grass, so green that it was fairly blue in comparison with the yellow of young leaves, rushed forward before the wind like a green flood of roaring water. Across the plain and up the slopes it poured as the waters of Niagara pour down the slope to the brink of the fall. Even the white foam of the rapids was simulated in the silvery-green flashes that raced with the breeze. Only summer grass thus flows. No other season can give it such vivid motion.

To me there came too a dozen summer messengers. Two or three varieties of transparent winged dragon flies swirled in and out of the little bay of sunshine. A fulvous and black butterfly lighted on the rock at my feet and gently, rhythmically raised and lowered his wings. It was as expressive of satisfaction as smacking the lips would be. Again and again he slipped away and then sailed back, leaving me still in doubt as to whether he was the lovely little Melitæa harrisi, or Phyciodes nycteis, both of which are very solemn names for pretty little butterflies which fly about as a signal that summer is already beginning to glow about us.

By and by the joy of the spot seemed to soothe him and he settled down for a longer stay, folding his wings and proving to me that he was nycteis without question, for there on his hind wing was distinctly the mark of the silver crescent. Butterflies should have been popular when knighthood was in flower, for each carries the heraldic blazon of his house where all may see.

Soon I found my seat on the rock disputed by a pair of dusky-wings. I had found the earlier dusky-wings of the woodland paths skittish and unwilling to let me get to close quarters with them. This may have been because I made the advances. I had been seated but a moment when this pair that had dashed madly away at my approach dashed as madly back and very nearly lighted on me, then they dashed away again.

Soon, however, they came back in more friendly fashion and settled down within reach of my hand, where I could observe them at leisure. Then I saw that this was to me a new variety of the dusky-wing, the Thanaos persius instead of Thanaos brizo, as I had thought. Persius’ dusky-wing had climbed the hill as I had, to see if summer was coming, and had found it here. The pale corydalis which nodded columbine-like heads of softest coral red and yellow knew it too, and drowsed in the sunshine as did the butterflies, but I went on, seeking more evidence.