But how seldom we put a cup of pleasure to our lips without a dash
of bitters, a touch of faultfinding.  My drop of discontent, that
day, was the thought that the northern woodland, at least in June,
yielded no fruit to match its beauty and its fragrance.

There is good browsing among the leaves of the wood and the grasses
of the meadow, as every well-instructed angler knows.  The bright
emerald tips that break from the hemlock and the balsam like verdant
flames have a pleasant savour to the tongue.  The leaves of the
sassafras are full of spice, and the bark of the black-birch twigs
holds a fine cordial.  Crinkle-root is spicy, but you must partake
of it delicately, or it will bite your tongue.  Spearmint and
peppermint never lose their charm for the palate that still
remembers the delights of youth.  Wild sorrel has an agreeable,
sour, shivery flavour.  Even the tender stalk of a young blade of
grass is a thing that can be chewed by a person of childlike mind
with much contentment.

But, after all, these are only relishes.  They whet the appetite
more than they appease it.  There should be something to eat, in the
June woods, as perfect in its kind, as satisfying to the sense of
taste, as the birds and the flowers are to the senses of sight and
hearing and smell.  Blueberries are good, but they are far away in
July.  Blackberries are luscious when they are fully ripe, but that
will not be until August.  Then the fishing will be over, and the
angler's hour of need will be past.  The one thing that is lacking
now beside this mountain stream is some fruit more luscious and
dainty than grows in the tropics, to melt upon the lips and fill the
mouth with pleasure.

But that is what these cold northern woods will not offer.  They are
too reserved, too lofty, too puritanical to make provision for the
grosser wants of humanity.  They are not friendly to luxury.

Just then, as I shifted my head to find a softer pillow of moss
after this philosophic and immoral reflection, Nature gave me her
silent answer.  Three wild strawberries, nodding on their long
stems, hung over my face.  It was an invitation to taste and see
that they were good.

The berries were not the round and rosy ones of the meadow, but the
long, slender, dark crimson ones of the forest.  One, two, three; no
more on that vine; but each one as it touched my lips was a drop of
nectar and a crumb of ambrosia, a concentrated essence of all the
pungent sweetness of the wildwood, sapid, penetrating, and
delicious.  I tasted the odour of a hundred blossoms and the green
shimmering of innumerable leaves and the sparkle of sifted sunbeams
and the breath of highland breezes and the song of many birds and
the murmur of flowing streams,--all in a wild strawberry.