GOOD-BYE TO SUMMER 215 



must get this dainty perfume where it grows. 

 If you pluck the blooms and take them home 

 they will hold their beauty and color for days, 

 but the scent will have strangely slipped from 

 them and trembled along the still, soft air back to 

 the woodland haunts whence it came. You 

 might find it there, wandering disconsolate in the 

 lonely brown spaces seeking for its own heart 

 of bloom, but from under your roof it has de- 

 parted. 



The flower is a strange one, anyway, in all its 

 growth. Fibrous roots it has none, just a bunch 

 of coral-like tubercles which draw nourishment 

 by their own subtle processes from the roots of 

 trees that shade them. Leaves it has none, just 

 a scarious brown bract that encloses a part of the 

 stem. Living upon canned food, so to speak, it 

 has lost its ability to win sustenance from earth 

 and air. It seems to live, not upon the sap of 

 these trees, but upon the dead roots and decayed 

 wood, a specially prepared humus without which 

 it may not thrive, even in its own limited, elusive 

 way. Among our wild flowers doomed to ulti- 

 mate extinction I fancy this will be one of the first 

 to disappear. In the days of great stretches of 

 moist, deep woodland it may well have flourished. 



