Thorns and Spines by Elizabeth Rundle Charles

IN a garden there once grew a beautiful, blossoming thorn. When the / spring came, for a fortnight it was always clothed with a robe of white / blossoms. They seemed at once relics of winter, and promises of summer. / It was as if Winter, in departing from the earth, had left behind a / fragment of his snowy vestments; and Spring, touching them with her / magic wand, had transformed them from snow-wreaths into wreaths of / snowy blossoms. They were beautiful even in fading; and for many days / after the whiteness had gone, they glowed into a delicate pink, and / strewed the earth with silky petals when they fell. *

* Thorns are abortive leaf-buds. Spines are the lower leaves of plants / metamorphosed into bristles, to guard the young tree from the attacks / of cattle. This little parable was suggested by a passage in "Modern / Painters."