There is a little flower in southern New Jersey called pyxie, or flowering moss, a very rare and hidden little thing; and I know an old botanist who traveled five hundred miles just to have the joy of seeing that little flower growing in the sandy swamp along Silver Run. If you have never seen the witch-hazel in bloom, it will pay you to travel five hundred and five miles to see it. But you won’t need to go so far,--unless you live beyond the prairies,--for the witch-hazel grows from Nova Scotia to Florida and west to Minnesota and Alabama. There is one flower that, according to Mr. John Muir (and he surely knows!), it will pay one to travel away up into the highest Sierra to see. It is the fragrant Washington lily, “the finest of all the Sierra lilies,” he says. “Its bulbs are buried in shaggy chaparral tangles, I suppose for safety from pawing bears; and its magnificent panicles sway and rock over the top of the rough snow-pressed bushes, while big, bold, blunt-nosed bees drone and mumble in its polleny bells. A lovely flower worth going hungry and footsore endless miles to see. The whole world seems richer now that I have found this plant in so noble a landscape.” [Illustration: “A WILD CREATURE THAT WON’T GET OUT OF YOUR WAY”] And so it seemed to the old botanist who came five hundred miles to find the tiny pyxie in the sandy swamps of southern New Jersey. So it will seem to you--the whole world will not only _seem_ richer, but will _be_ richer for you--when you have found the witch-hazel bush all covered with summer’s gold in the bleak woods of November. VII You ought to see a big pile of golden pumpkins in some farmhouse shed or beside the great barn door. You ought to see a field of corn in the shock; hay in a barn mow; the jars of fruit, the potatoes, apples, and great chunks of wood in the farmhouse cellar. You ought to see how a farmer gets ready for the winter--the comfort, the plenty, the sufficiency of it all! VIII You ought to see how the muskrats, too, get ready for the winter, and the bees and the flowers and the trees and the frogs--everything. Winter is coming. The cold will kill--if it has a chance. But see how it has no chance. How is it that the bees will buzz, the flowers open, the birds sing, the frogs croak again next spring as if there had been no freezing, killing weather? Go out and see why for yourselves. IX