We are less simple and true than the dandelion, the dog-fennel and the sweet-clover here in the grass. The small common blossoms grow so cheerily one is glad to come back to them. It is true that not one wee tube or strap or head in any cluster could have much life outside the aggregate blossom, but the integrity and perfection of each is an essential factor in the integrity and perfection of the whole. The tiny single flower that I can pull from this dandelion seems but an insignificant speck, but, by and by, could it have been let alone, it would, its ripeness and perfection attained, have taken to itself wings and sailed fluffily off upon the breeze to renew its life perhaps a thousand miles from here. Seeing it float through the air a poet might have found it a theme for a sonnet. A scientist might have seen universal law embodied in its structure, or a seer have reasoned from it to life eternal. [Illustration] Yet, but for the co-operation of its fellows in the body floral, it could not have lived any more than, save for its fellows, what we know as the dandelion could have lived. The law of co-operation, like all of Nature’s laws, makes for rightness and fitness all along the line ⚜ She teaches us, with ever-repeated emphasis, the lesson of independence of kind. The isolated being is, everywhere, the comparatively helpless being. The tree growing by itself in the open field often attains to more symmetrical perfection and beauty than the tree in the crowded forest, but woodmen tell us that the forest tree makes better timber ☙ We must live with and for our fellows, but he does this best who, in the quiet order of the common life, opens widest his soul to the Source thereof, and growing to the full stature of a man helps on to perfection what should be that composite flower of the race, our human civilization. [Illustration: ❦] [Illustration] The little spring here gushes up and then sweeps away along a stony bed overgrown with brakes and tares. On its margin, amid a tangle of wild blackberry, I have come upon a forest of scouring-rush ☙ It is a quaint growth. I love to put my face close to the earth and, looking through the rushes’ green stems, to fancy myself a wee brownie, wandering among a ☘ dense wilderness of pines. The development of the miniature trees is an interesting process ❦ First the ground is covered with slender brown fingers ❧ thrusting up through the soil. These grow rapidly, and in a few days spread out their brief, verticillate branches to the breeze, as proudly as any great tree might do. Here is a tiny finger just pointing upward; yonder towers the giant of the lilliputian forest, fully half-a-foot high. “Scouring-weed,” says the farmer, contemptuously, “they aint no good. Some call ’em horsetail.”