The afternoon sun has more resilience here than elsewhere. It bounds with fervent flashes of elasticity from the glossy leaves of the bushes that have waded out farthest and made islands of themselves. The high-bush blueberries are the most daring of all, and stand in the largest clumps farthest out. These, late in May with an off-shore wind, shower the whole surface of the water with their fallen corollas. More than once have I seen the cove white with them on Memorial Day, as if the bushes, standing with bowed heads, strewed the waves with memorial flowers for the pasture people who have died at sea. Earlier in the year the elms have made the whole surface of the cove brown with their round, wing-margined seeds, and after the memorial flowers of the blueberry bushes are gone the maples will send out millions of two-sailed seed boats, reddening the whole surface with their argosies as they go out to sea, wing and wing. Now all these things have passed and the surface of the water is clean again to dimple with the under-water swirl of a minnow-hunting pickerel or lap lazily against your canoe with the dying undulations of the waves from outside. After the bold blueberry bushes, less daring but still eager pasture people have waded in and formed lesser island clumps of their own. These were led by the sweet-gale, holding her dark-green silken skirt daintily up, so fragrant-souled that she fears no evil, trailed by the saucy wild rose, cheerful spiræa, gloomy cassandra, and chubby baby alders. If you watch these you will note that they shiver in the lazy breeze as if they feared the pass to which their temerity may have brought them. Yet there they stand, and the miniature tides swirl about their pink toes and die in the pools behind them, so closely grow the sedges and little marsh plants that fill them until the fishes from the cove nose about their stalks in vain attempt to enter. Just outside the bush fringe, where the maples are mirrored in undulations, whirl and skip, each according to his kind, the surface insects of the cove. Of these I hail with greatest joy, as any boy should, the “lucky bug.” You know the one I mean. He is a third of an inch long, almost as broad, oval, a sort of whaleback monitor without any turret. He is hard shelled and a Baptist, judged from the pertinacity with which he sticks to deep water, but a Baptist gone sadly wrong, for he waltzes continually with his fellows. Round and round they go in a mazy whirl that would make you dizzy if at the last gasp they did not reverse.