Next comes a dry, homely, crooked, blackish, dead-looking twig, the slender divisions of which are tipped with short clusters of very fine purplish buds, rich in color, but so small as readily to escape notice. This I broke from a bush in a swampy place. It is _Leucothoë_, a plant of special interest to me for personal reasons. Year after year, as I turned the leaves of Gray’s Manual on one errand and another, I read this romantic-sounding Greek name, and wondered what kind of plant it stood for. Then, during a May visit to the mountains of North Carolina, I came upon a shrub growing mile after mile along roadsides and brooksides, loaded down, literally, with enormous crops of sickishly sweet, white flower-clusters. At first I took it for some species of _Andromeda_, but on bringing it to book found it to be Leucothoë. I was delighted to see it. It is a satisfaction to have a familiar name begin to mean something. Finally, a year or two later, passing in winter through a bit of swamp where I had been accustomed to wander as a child, with no thought of finding anything new (as if there were not something new everywhere), I stopped before a bush bearing purple buds and clusters of dry capsules. The capsules might have been those of Andromeda, for aught I should have noticed, but the buds had a novel appearance and told a different story. Again I betook myself to the Manual, and lo! this bush, growing in the swamp that I should have thought I knew better than any other in the world, turned out to be another species--our only northern one--of Leucothoë. So I might have fitted name and thing together long ago, if I had kept my eyes open. As Hamlet said, “There’s the rub.” Keeping one’s eyes open isn’t half so easy as it sounds. Really, the bush is one that nobody except a botanist ever sees (which is the reason, doubtless, why it has no vernacular name); or if here and there a man does see it, it is sure to be in flowering time (in middle June), when he passes it by without a second glance as “high-bush blueberry.” I am pleased to have it growing on my present beat, and to give it a place here in my collection of Minor Prophets. How little the two (Leucothoë and blueberry) resemble each other at this time of the year may be seen by comparing the stem I have been talking about with the one lying next to it--a short twig, every branchlet of which ends in a very bright, extremely handsome (if one stops to regard it) pinkish globe. This is the high-bush blueberry in its best winter estate. Every bud is like a jewel.