Survivor of so much that her fear is gone, triumphant April answers the dark powers as if they could never speak again. Spring after spring she stands among flying petals and smiles at the last bitter winds. She will not grant that the green earth was ever vanquished, fiercely alive as now it is. Scornfully the new silver bloom on the clover sheds the relentless rain. Undaunted, reaffirming, she summons all beauty of color, music, and fragrance beneath her banners, with a vitality so profound and impregnable that more than other months she is careless of man’s sympathy. April, preoccupied, hastens from crumbling furrow to meadows that shout the coming of the green. Intense and too eager for tenderness, she craves no admiration. Quite without excuse, the song sparrow sits on a wine-colored willow twig and sings frantically. Anyone has as good a reason for ecstasy as he—merely that the dumb struggle is ended and the long suns have returned in splendor. Contemplative between their dark exotic leaves, dogtooth violets fill the light-flecked hollows. Spring beauties open warily at daybreak to show stamens of deep rose. Where imperious amber waters go foaming through the swamp, spendthrift gold of cowslips is swept down to the rivers, and budded branches that leaned too close above the ripple are shut out from the sun world for a while. Mauve and canary slippers are waiting for the fairy queen where our wild orchid of the North dangles them on remote knolls, but they are usually found and borne off by some one for whom they are in no way suitable. Translucent young leaves glitter beside the stream’s path. Dandelion rosettes appear with serene impartiality on guarded lawn and mountain pasture, where steal also the polite but persistent “pussy tiptoes,” asserting the right to display white leaves in spring, if so a plant should choose. The snail has deserted his shell and gone forth to take the air at the risk of being plowed under. None of April’s children remember or foresee. The vivid present is enough. The apple boughs are inlaid with coral. The peach is a cloud of dawn, and petals of the forward cherry and pear are floating reluctantly down. Wild-fruit trees, mysteriously planted, are misty white above the woodland thicket—scented crabapple and twisted branch of plum. This is the month of blossoms, as May is the month of shimmering leaves and June of the fruitless flower.