THE MOUNTAIN BOG 221 
join me in my wanderings up the side of an Alpine 
rivulet, splashing through its bogs and luxuriating in its 
treasures. 
At first starting, one meets the stream, a brawling 
torrent, foaming down through the pine woods. Amid 
the dense gloom of their branches the sunlight, here and 
there, pours shafts of brilliant gold upon the leaping 
snow of the stream, and, in rare patches of light the oak- 
fern’s green fronds shine with their almost unnatural 
brilliance of emerald. Round the roots of the pine-trees, in 
the unruffled stillness of their shade, spreads a thick soft 
carpet of moss, starred with the white waxen cups of 
Pyrola uniflora. So the course of the water continues 
downwards through the wood, and, as we mount, we pass 
through thickets of tall yellow Monkshood. Then, per- 
haps, along beneath a little cliff, stretches a bed of 
Lactuca alpina, \uxuriating in the dankness. It 1s 
strange to see this stalwart, splendid plant, six feet high 
or so, crowned with a head of crowded purple dandelions, 
thus forming into broad spreading colonies, when one 
remembers that it still clings, in rare lonely specimens, to 
inaccessible damp rocks high up in the ranges of Clova 
and Lochnagar. And yet, in cultivation, it is no less 
easy than handsome, for any rich corner. Now, in the 
forest, we are in the track of many splendid, riotous 
water-plants. Perhaps we may come upon the very rare 
Hugueninia tanacetifolia, like a big yellow Valerian, 
which haunts wet wooded places in the Valaisan Alps. 
In any case we see the Valerians themselves, and, in more 
open places, the loose white stars of Saaifraga rotundi- 
folia, stout and sturdy, or the palmate leaves and white 
showers of Ranunculus aconitifolius. And then, not at 
the water’s edge, but up on the knoll of some decayed 
tree-stump, sprouts from the rotten soil one arching 
plume of Streptopus amplexicaulis, like a tall branched 
