ORCHID-HUNTING 145 



them. Then came a time when for five years I was 

 not able to travel to their home. When, at last, I 

 made my pilgrimage to where they grew, there was 

 no cathedral of mighty green arches roofed by a 

 shimmering June sky; there were no aisles of softly 

 singing trees; and there were no rows of sweet faces 

 looking up at me and waiting for my coming; only 

 heaps of sawdust and hideous masses of lopped 

 branches showed where a steam sawmill had cut its 

 deadly way. Underneath the fallen dying boughs 

 which had once waved above the world, companioned 

 only by sky and sun and the winds of heaven, I found 

 one last starveling blossom left of all her lovely 

 company. Protected no longer by the sheltering 

 boughs, she was bleached nearly white by the sun, 

 and her stem crept crookedly along the ground 

 underneath the mass of brush and litter which had 

 once been a carpet of gold. Never since that day 

 have I visited the place where my friends wait for 

 me no more. 



It was another orchid which, for eleven years, on 

 the last day of every June, made me travel two 

 hundred miles due north. From an old farmhouse on 

 the edge of the Berkshires I would start out in the 

 dawn-dusk on the first day of every July. The 

 night-hawks would still be twanging above me as I 

 followed, before sunrise, a dim silent road over the 

 hills all sweet with the scent of wild-grape and the 

 drugged perfume of chestnut tassels. At last I 

 would reach a barway sunken in masses of sweet- 

 fern and shaded by thickets of alder and witch-hazel. 



