I904] Kennedy,— Flora of Willoughby 95 



abundant and the trees larger ; in fact at this spot one thinks of the 

 Virginian Alleghanies with beautiful Viola Canadensis and Canhphy- 

 cenm thaIictroide$ ; while a few hundred feet further north on the 

 slope the trees are smaller, the falling of rock from the cliff more fre- 

 quent and the characteristic cliff plants appear at the roadside. 

 Further i:p the road, at the " Devil's Den " the boulders are very 

 large, say from 20 to 40 feet across. 



There is considerable lime in the district, not to be noticed in the 

 delicious drinking water so abundantly bursting forth on the south- 

 ern part of the ridge, but seen here and there in white frosty patches 

 under and about loose rocks, and in one part of the bog below 

 the house spreading over a half-acre meadow to which the name 

 Marl Pond has been given ; a pond from four to six inches deep with 

 the water gently moving over a flat bottom, which in all parts except 

 one spot is as hard as a floor. The mosses, ferns and many flower- 

 ing plants of the region are all more or less those of a limey district. 

 Slides of earth and rock from the upper part of the clifif have left 

 a series of channeled gravel trails in the higher portion of the wooded 

 talus of the cliff. In many of them water flows for the greater part 

 of the summer, especially at the north and south ends of the precipi- 

 tous walls ; that is, not from the actual summit of the mountain, but 

 from springs part way down the sides. These slides are old features 

 of the mountain, the only recent one occurring about forty years ago 

 near the north end of the cliff, obstructing the then new highway ftr 

 several days, and made more memorable by happening on the 4th of 

 July, for which reason the slide has always borne that patriotic name. 

 The so-called " Flower Garden " of the earlier botanists is at the 

 base of the big cliff just referred to and here the wearing away of the 

 mountain has somewhat lessened, and apparently the water which 

 plays so large a part in the disintegration has sought other channels ; 

 for the garden of late years is neither so rich in flowers nor so cool a 

 collecting place on a hot day as other parts of the cliff walk. In this 

 respect it differs greatly from Smuggler's Notch where the slides are 

 usually the result of very heavy rains and where the loss of earth on 

 the mountain side has not left such relatively large bare cliffs, and 

 where the mass of earth yet to come down is infinitely greater than 

 at Willoughby. A slide in 1897 at Smuggler's Notch filled the high- 

 way with mud three or four feet deep ; and the upper surface having 

 in places dried hard enough to walk upon, the mass had a lava-like 



