And, anyway, before we can reason it out, the rain has ceased and the last rays of the descending sun come through an opening in the clouds in that beautiful phenomenon known as a "sunburst.'[TN-3] The white beams come diagonally through the moisture-laden air, as if in a good-night smile to the tender flowers and buds. Warming with the sunshine and watering with the showers--that is Miss April making her flower garden grow. MAY--PERFECTION OF BEAUTY V. MAY--PERFECTION OF BEAUTY _Among the changing months May stands confessed The sweetest and in fairest colors dressed._ --THOMSON. Surely the poet sang truly. We would not forget Lowell's challenge "What is so rare as a day in June," but as we sit here on the top of a limestone cliff nearly a hundred feet above the bed of the creek, and watch the red sun brightening the gray of the eastern sky, while the robins and the meadow larks are singing joyous matins we steep our senses in the delicate colorings of earth and sky that signalize the awakening of another day and the real revival of another year. April was encouraging, but there were many bare boughs and many of the last year's leaves still clung to the oaks and made a conspicuous feature of the landscape. The leafy month of June will show us more foliage, but it will be of a darker and more uniform shade of green. Now, as the sun rises higher and sends his rays through both the woodlands and the brushlands we thrill with delight at the kaleidoscope of color. There are no withered leaves to mar the beauty now. Seen in mass, and at a distance, the woodlands are a soft cinerous purple. But the tops, where the ruddy rays of the sun are glancing, are a hazy cloud of tender green, pink, yellow and pale purple. Nearer trees show in their opening leaves pale tints of the same gorgeous colors which we see in the fall. The maple keys and the edges of the tender leaves glow blood-red in the morning sun. The half-developed leaves of the birch and the poplar are a yellowish-green, not unlike the yellow which they show in autumn. The neatly plaited folds of the leaves of the oak display a greenish or cinerous purple, a soft and delicate presentment of the stronger colors which come in October, just as the overture gives us faint voicings of the beauty which the opera is to bring; just as Lowell's organist gives us _"The faint auroral flushes sent Along the wavering vista of his dream."_