For my own part, I approve of garden flowers because they are so
orderly and so certain; but wild flowers I love, just because there
is so much chance about them.  Nature is all in favour of certainty
in great laws and of uncertainty in small events.  You cannot
appoint the day and the place for her flower-shows.  If you happen
to drop in at the right moment she will give you a free admission.
But even then it seems as if the table of beauty had been spread for
the joy of a higher visitor, and in obedience to secret orders which
you have not heard.

Have you ever found the fringed gentian?

          "Just before the snows,
     There came a purple creature
      That lavished all the hill:
     And summer hid her forehead,
      And mockery was still.

     The frosts were her condition:
      The Tyrian would not come
     Until the North evoked her,--
      'Creator, shall I bloom?'"

There are strange freaks of fortune in the finding of wild flowers,
and curious coincidences which make us feel as if some one were
playing friendly tricks on us.  I remember reading, one evening in
May, a passage in a good book called THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS,
in which Colonel Higginson describes the singular luck that a friend
of his enjoyed, year after year, in finding the rare blossoms of the
double rueanemone.  It seems that this man needed only to take a
walk in the suburbs of any town, and he would come upon a bed of
these flowers, without effort or design.  I envied him his good
fortune, for I had never discovered even one of them.  But the next
morning, as I strolled out to fish the Swiftwater, down below Billy
Lerns's spring-house I found a green bank in the shadow of the wood
all bespangled with tiny, trembling, twofold stars,--double
rueanemones, for luck!  It was a favourable omen, and that day I
came home with a creel full of trout.

The theory that Adam lived out in the woods for some time before he
was put into the garden of Eden "to dress it and to keep it" has an
air of probability.  How else shall we account for the arboreal
instincts that cling to his posterity?