174 Rhodora [OCTOBER 
find the plant again. 'The island is my birthplace, and I have known 
its commons, its swamps and thickets, its sea beaches and its pond 
shores from childhood, but not living there in 1874 I wrote to Mrs. 
Matthew Starbuck and asked her to be on the lookout for this 
heather. She is a lady fond of our wild flowers and with facilities 
for collecting them, but the island has an area of some fifty square 
miles, and we had no clew to the locality where Mrs. Atwater made 
her happy find, so it is not strange that years passed before the 
. plant was seen by Nantucket eyes. 
I learned in 1879 that Mrs. 'T. E. Morris, of Saginaw, Michigan, 
saw it for the second time in 1871. She was Mr. Atwater's niece 
and was with her uncle and aunt when the plant was first found. In 
a letter to Mrs. Atwater she tells of visiting again the spot where 
they had seen it together, of finding “the same old roots" and of 
searching the vicinity in vain for more specimens. She says “roots”; 
that is misleading, for there was only one plant, as ] know from see- 
ing it many times, year after year. 
In 1878 Mrs. Starbuck’s daughter, Mrs: Merriam (afterwards Mrs. 
Spinney), brought home from a walk and showed her mother “а 
new flower” which the latter declared at once must be the one I had 
charged her to seek. She was right; the long-hidden heath was re- 
discovered. 
The next time I went to Nantucket I was taken to see the precious 
plant. It was seven or eight inches high and a bushy little thing, 
full of flowers; its habit always was to bloom from early summer till 
late in the fall, and on that account it was conspicuous, but it was 
fortunately screened from observation by bushes growing between it 
and the road, and furthermore the bitter polygala, which matches the 
bell-heather closely in color, was abundant in the vicinity. This 
plant lived till about 1903, thirty-five years after Mrs. Atwater first 
saw it. Mrs. Stokeley Morgan, who had known it for several years 
before its death, tells me that she found it alive and vigorous in 
the late fall either of 1902 or 1903 and protected it by blocks and 
boughs; the next spring it was dead, perhaps killed by some heavy 
thing (part of the protection) which had fallen upon it, or perhaps it 
had lived its life. And so our fair flower went in mystery as it came. 
But some time before this Mrs. Morgan had found a second plant not 
far from the original, and after that was dead she took Judge Church- 
ill of Dorchester to see the new one. He remarked that if the first 
