Gayly in possession of the fields, black-eyed Susan, known to the farmer as “that confounded yellow bull’s-eye,” is holding her own, prepared to resist to the utmost the onslaught of the goldenrod, which presumes to unfurl in summer the banners of fall. The clear yellow evening primrose, scion of one of our very best old English families, associates democratically with a peasant mullein stalk, canary-flecked, since they both fancy sun and sand. Magnificent sometimes upon the sand banks rises a clump of that copper-in-the-sunshine flower, the butterfly weed, soon to become as fugitive as our fair, lost trailing arbutus, the cardinal, and the fringed gentian, if its lovers do not woo it less selfishly. All beauty refuses captivity. In upland meadows the orange hawkweed is afoot, waving its delirious-colored “paint brush” wantonly amid the pasture grass in the light hours, but folding it at sunset, no sipper of the dews. Brook sunflowers have come to the edge of the stream, but not to look into the waters; their sunward-gazing petals are delicately scented, surpassing their sisters of the fenced garden. The half-tamed tiger lily, haunter of deserted dooryards and faithful even to abandoned mountain farms long since given over to the wildcat and the owl, wanderer by dusty roadsides, offers each morning new buds, and by twilight they have bloomed and withered. Like the May rose, this is an elegiac flower, clinging to lost gardens when all the rest have vanished, though patches of tansy, herb of witchlore, will show pungent golden buttons for long years untended, let the forgotten gardener but plant it once. How many a little cabin, built in eagerness and hope, is remembered at last only by the tiger lily, May rose, and chimney swift! Yellow sweet clover, catching a roothold anywhere, declaring the gravel bed a garden, makes it happiness to breathe the entranced air. The yellow butterflies, like leaves of autumn, tremble and flurry where the sun-steeped field meets the sweet dark wood. Among the rocks gleam ebony seeds of the blackberry lily, whose star of orange and umber is about to set. Who knows, besides the birds, that embroidered on the moss new scarlet partridge berries are ripe, hung from the vagrant vine of pale-veined leaf that does not fear the snow? Only a month ago in this fairy greenery lay the furry white partridge blossom, almost invisible, but with a fragrance like that of just-opened water lilies, and now the green fruit colors to the Christmas hue. There are no flowers like these. The wood fairies wear them with their gowns of spangled cobweb trimmed with moonlight.