She crawled between the gray, moss-covered bars of a fence which separated the two pastures, and went toward some deeper woodland where pines and firs grew. Here, Miss Wallace said, she would be likely to find them. She looked sharply for brown, clustered leaves, which always deceived one as to the wealth beneath them. At last on a little mossy knoll, in a clearing among the pines, she found what she sought. Kneeling eagerly on the damp ground, she searched with careful fingers through the brown leaves. Green leaves revealed themselves. She smelled the sweetest fragrance imaginable—the fragrance of flowers and brown earth and fresh leaves all in one. She looked beneath the green leaves; and there, with their pale pink faces almost buried in the moss, she found the first mayflowers of the spring. Tenderly she raised the tendrils from the moss and grass, and examined the tiny blossoms, in whose centers the hoar frost of winter seemed to linger. These then were the flowers her New England mother had so loved. Years before, perhaps in this very spot, her mother had come to search for them. She almost hated to pluck them—they looked so cozy lying there against the brown earth, but she wanted to send them to her grandmother for her mother’s birthday. On other knolls and around the gray pasture rocks, even at the foot of the fir trees, she found more buds and a few opened blossoms. Her mother had long ago taught her Whittier’s “Song to the Mayflowers,” and she said some of the verses which she still remembered, as she sat beneath the trees, and pulled away the dead leaves from the flowers’ trailing stems. “O sacred flowers of faith and hope, As sweetly now as then Ye bloom on many a birchen slope, In many a pine dark glen. “Behind the sea-wall’s rugged length, Unchanged, your leaves unfold, Like love behind the manly strength Of the brave hearts of old. “So live the fathers in their sons, Their sturdy faith be ours, And ours the love that overruns Its rocky strength with flowers.” For an hour she roamed about the woods, finding evergreen to line her box for the flowers, and some cheery partridge vine, whose green leaves and red berries seemed quite untouched by the winter’s snow. It was quiet in among the trees. She was glad after all that she had come alone. At school one needed to be away from the girls once in a while just to get acquainted with oneself.