Down by the streamlet in the Frying Pan, in the heavy clay soil of the bank, I see this morning the flower-scapes of the coltsfoot are lifting betimes their curious bent heads. Two days more, and they will star the bare earth with their golden blossoms. That is a sure sign that winter is over, the labourers will tell you, weatherwise in their ancestral lore; and, indeed, the coltsfoot is a prudent and a wary herb, which I have seldom known go wrong in its calculation of probabilities. It makes its own weather forecast, independently of the Meteorological Office, and it backs its opinion. As long as it thinks frost is likely to recur, it “lies low,” like Br’er Rabbit; but as soon as it feels pretty confident the worst is past, and no more hard weather will come to nip it in the bud, it boldly sends up its leafless flower-stem, looking more like a shoot of asparagus than anything else, with which most people are familiar. I have never seen it make a serious mistake, even in the sunniest and most treacherous English spring weather.

Who gave it its wisdom?—to parody Mr. Swinburne. How did it come so well to time itself as the earliest among our conspicuous spring flowers? Well, coltsfoot is a composite, belonging to the same minor group as the common ragworts—its very leaf, indeed, being a good deal like some of the larger ragworts in type, especially those handsome exotics of the race, so much cultivated in greenhouses under the name of cinerarias. But living in cold northern climates, on the banks of streams, in deep clay soil, where it spreads most vigorously, it has learned by experience to accommodate itself to its environment. It did so, in fact, many thousand years before Mr. Herbert Spencer taught poor recent humanity that latter-day catchword. Growing in thickset places, by running water, where its own large leaves and those of its neighbours would overshadow and hide its dainty blossoms in the height of summer, it has acquired the odd trick of sending them up naked, on the naked clay, in very early spring, when they court and easily attract the attention of the first spring insects to visit and fertilize them. In order to do this it must lay by material the summer before, and that material the prudent plants bury deep out of harm’s way, in their creeping underground rootstock. Owing to the dampness and chilliness of the clay, which suits its constitution best, coltsfoot hides its rootstock exceptionally deep in the earth, and this precaution affords it, on the whole, a safe protection alike against cold and against burrowing enemies. As long as the frozen earth remains chilly underneath, the buds make no stir; but as soon as the subsoil begins to rise in temperature to a very modest point the flower-heads grow apace from the buried material, exactly as hyacinths do from a bulb when placed in water in a slightly warm atmosphere. And such a raising of temperature in the subsoil is one of the surest signs th............