Still further the dead leaves lift, and the violets look out, and then run all over the place. The wind-flowers push up next, and before you realize what has happened, the place is literally dancing with them. Where did they all come from?
Last spring you went through this very wood and saw only a few scattered about at wide distances, where there chanced to be a filter of light through the dense branches overhead. Now the place is an open air ball-room of curtesying sprites.
Such are the wonderful ways of the woods!
In sheltered spots where the cold winds cannot reach, cushions of wood-sorrel unfurl their pale-green leaves, and then send up, cautiously and shyly, the fragile bells that look as though a breath would blow them away. The woodruff also sets to work, for there must be beauty of odour as well as beauty of colour and form, and something will be needed to take the place of the violets when they go.
By this time the bluebells are ready to come out; but there is no shyness about these, sturdy in their growth, no obstacle seems to hinder them; up come the green spears, making their own way through dead leaves and twigs and moss and acorn cup, through thickets of low-lying bramble, through carpets of close-growing ivy; if a dead branch or a tree trunk lies in their way, they peep out at one side, “Is there a trifle of daylight here?” And up they come, carpeting with blue the open spaces between the huge masses of rock that lie pell-mell about the surface; while the humble little ground-ivy lays cool green fingers, and a little later its violet-blue flowers, over the cream and silver of the birches, the soft grey of the beeches, and the rough bark of the oaks, where the felled trunks lie among the up-springing grass, sensing for the last time the coming of spring and summer on the hillside.
Then it is, when the bluebells have turned to papery seed-pods, and the primroses have paled away into space, that the foxgloves begin to shake out their flowers and the hillside glows and palpitates with colour. They flourish with a joyous abandon that is positively infectious, and makes one feel there is still much left to live for. The way they suddenly appear when the trees are down—whole battalions of them—where only a season before there were regiments of larches, or thick woods of mixed timber, is really marvellous. Undoubtedly the ground must be packed with seed; more than this, there must always be young seedlings coming up among the undergrowth or in sheltered crevices where the larch needles do not penetrate; for no sooner are the trees cut than foxgloves start to spread their leaves to the light, and by the following summer, often before half the timber has been carried, you find them by the thousand—and that is a very low estimate—dotted all over the rough land, and, with a host of ferns, trying to cover up all that is maimed, and bare, and jagged, to hide the scars where the mighty have fallen, to give beauty for ashes in a very literal sense.