THE GREATER BOG-PLANTS 193 
the ground of the dealer in herbaceous stuff—so will slide 
past the tall herbaceous Phloxes with a mere comment 
that late summer holds nothing more richly splendid 
than ‘General von Heuzst ’—the spelling is uncertain in 
all catalogues—sparkling cherry-rose, with a clear white 
eye—flowering profusely too, in mounded heads of 
circular flowers, and striking the eye, in a mass, from 
quarter of a mile away. And this is only primus inter 
pares, where almost all are beautiful. 
Now, last of all, comes my plaint for Lysichiton kam- 
schatcense. This plant, of daunting title, is very likely 
not what I mean, though; Kew’s Lysichiton has the 
foliage of my lost love, but its flowers, I am told, are 
yellow. Now this is the tale of my discovery and loss. 
After a long toil amid the solfataras of Noboribets’, in 
the Hokkaido, I was returning, wearied, through the 
calm twilight of a grey day, when I came suddenly upon 
a sopping bog, filled with pools and gleaming stagnations 
of wet. And, dotted about over the pale expanses, were 
starting up, on stems of an inch or two, great snowy 
blossoms exactly the size and shape and colour of Calla 
ethiopica. As soon as the flowers were over, up would 
come the leaves. I saw them, on advanced specimens— 
opulent, splendid fans, exactly like those of Musa 
Ensete. You may imagine how eagerly, with pantomime 
and gesticulation, I procured me, from an Aino villager, 
a spade or mattock that must have been twin to that 
with which Cain killed Abel; how, with this primeval 
implement, I raked up the stinking depths of the marsh, 
to get a few plants with their vast white roots intact : 
how I sent them off, with elaborate directions, to be 
grown for me in Yokohama. And how, of course, amid 
the torrid heats of that pestilential place they all unani- 
mously expired, and I have never since been able to 
acquire that precious plant in a living state. True, I 
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