Mar. 22—Walking in the country is a most depressing business these days: square miles of land lacking the attention of hoe and plough: the only signs of life apart from birds and other wild creatures, are a ragged farmer and his wife tearing up the long-neglected cotton plants to give the stunted, weed-ridden, beans a chance of survival. Only that sturdiest of all the crops, the winter wheat, lifts up its head and seems to say, "defeat me if you can—for am I not the staff of life?" Great patches of Sunspurge, Shepherd's Purse and Dandelion hold sway where well-tended crops should be. But of all revolting sights the peasant homesteads are the worst: ravished by retreating troops and their conquerors; they are just heaps of tumbled brick and charred wood with the kitchen stove standing alone as a monument to the family life which once existed there. The little farmstead stands bare with its hedges charred by fire....yet in the midst of all this sacrilege, Nature seems determined to pass her kindly paint-brush over the dismal scene: for every little compound, now thrown open to the gaze of the passer-by has its two or three Prunus trees now in full bloom, masses of pure white to pale pink flowers....plum, apricot or cherry. And this reminds me that there is some misunderstanding about the word "prunus," (literally meaning plum): according to the Linnaean classification this word covers plum, apricot, cherry, almond and a number of other ornamental irees such as the Chinese grow, yet we e it always with the plum fter at least t good reasons: first, the Chinese have idealized the plum blossom in those pretty blue and white vases which we always refer to as "prunus;" second, the craze of our parents for feeding us that much-hated dried fruit which has stamped on our minds the original meaning of at least one Latin word.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.