There is no remembrance of civilization, no aura of human nobility about the smilacina, which in my regard comes next as a flower for Memorial Day. Hardly the violet could be more modest. Its tiny spike of white bloom is borne only a few inches high on a two-leaved stalk, the leaves in shape and gloss reminding one of the florist’s smilax, whence probably the name. Yet its very simplicity makes it peculiarly a flower for garlands. The leaves, growing on the stalk itself, make just the right amount of green, and a nosegay or a wreath of smilacina alone has a dainty beauty that few flowers could thus give. The misty white blooms on the glossy green seem like shattered tears of gentle spirits of the woods bringing their tribute of sorrow to the fallen heroes. Nor are the blooms of this plant which the school children have gathered and which the veterans have placed on the graves the only ones that are there. All along one side of this cemetery the woods themselves press their sheltering beauty, and in them the earth is garlanded with smilacina blooms. Passing from Memorial Day observances to these I often think that the forest itself decorates in honor of its own whose resting places would be otherwise unmarked. It may be for the people of an elder race all other traces of whom are lost that the tiny, lovely flowers group their white and green, or for the humbler creatures of the wood who would otherwise lack tokens of mourning, but the smilacina certainly decorates the mounds in all woodlands with mystic tracings which have their own meaning. But it does more than this. In modest beauty it slips shyly out from the sheltering friendliness of the pines and stands with bowed head on many a dewy Memorial Day morning by such mounds as it may reach, in all gentle friendliness. Shyer yet are the saxifrages which sometimes stand near by. These I have seen, clad as if in Confederate gray, by a mound which veterans had marked with a Union flag and along which tiny blue violets nestled lovingly. So, surely, they stand in mute respect and nestle as lovingly by many another spot where the remembered one fought as bravely beneath another flag. Long ago the good brown earth taught the blue and the gray to thus fraternize, and though we forgot it for a time the lesson came soon back to us with renewed force. The saxifrages and the smilacina have not ventured far out of the all-sheltering wood, but the Confederate gray is borne all over the score of memorial acres by the wild immortelles, everlasting, as the children call them, and no caretaker’s rake or lawnmower can keep these down, or clip the violets so close that their blue fails to nestle lovingly where heroes lie. All over the place from spring until autumn these two set their garlands side by side, as do those who mourn on the one Memorial Day of the year. Thus constant are the sun and rain and the tiny herbs of the brown earth.