I wonder why we always smile at this most beautiful spring flower,--for it was a spring blossom, the very first of the season, which was growing in the soft green of the brookside grass, its yellow head all swathed in a maroon and green, striped and flecked, pointed hood, lifted bravely above the protecting herbage into the nipping air. The flowering spadix I could not see; only the handsome, protecting spathe which was wound about the tender blooms to protect them from the cold. When the sun is high in the sky this spathe will loosen a bit and let visiting insects enter for the fertilization of the blossom. But in that cold air of early morning it was wrapped tight. I have seen orchids tenderly nurtured in conservatories that had not half the honest beauty of this flower. Neither to me is the odor of the derided skunk-cabbage more unpleasant than that of many a coddled and admired garden bloom--a dahlia, for instance. Yet I smiled in derision on catching the first whiff of it, and so do we all. If the _symplocarpus_ cared it would be too bad, but it does not. Unconscious of its caddish critics, it blooms serenely on in the swamps and takes the tiny insects into its confidence and its hood, and adds a bit of rich color to the place when no other blossom dares. And even as I looked at it the sun slipped out of the low band of dark horizon-mists and sent a golden good-morning like a benediction right down upon the head of the humble, courageous, sturdy beauty of the brookside. After that approval why should any blossom care? MARCH WINDS For two days the mad March winds have been blowing a fifty-mile gale, setting all the woodland crazy. No wonder the March hare is mad. He lives in Bedlam. No sooner does he squat comfortably in his form, his fair fat belly with round apple-tree bark lined, topped off with wee green sprigs of rash but succulent spring herbs from the brookside, ready to contemplate nature with all the philosophy which such a condition engenders, than the form rises in the air and its component leaves skitter through the wood and over the hill out of sight, leaving him denuded. The usually dignified and gentle trees howl like beagles on his trail. The protecting scrub oaks, gone mad, too, dab and flip at him till he gets fidgety with thoughts of horned owls, and things rattle down out of the sky as if he were being pelted with buckshot. All these matters get on his nerves after a little, and if he sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from fear and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy, there is small blame to him. Even man, whose mental girth and weight are supposed to be ballast sufficient against all buffetings, going forth on such a day needs the buttons of his composure well sewed on or he will find it ripped from him like the hare’s form and sent skittering down the lea along with his hat, while he himself bolts here and there fighting phantoms and objurgating the unseen.