ORCHID-HUNTING 149 



a lover of deep and dank woods, with its golden- 

 yellow seed-cluster, or 'rattle,' growing from the 

 centre of its fringed leaves. The oddest of all the 

 ferns was the maidenhair spleen-wort, whose tiny 

 leaves are of the shape of those of the well-known 

 maidenhair fern. When they are exposed to bright 

 sunlight, all the fertile leaves which have seeds on 

 their surface suddenly begin to move, and for three 

 or four minutes vibrate back and forth as rapidly as 

 the second-hand of a watch. 



Farther and farther I pushed on into the treacher- 

 ous marsh, picking my way from tussock to tussock. 

 Now and then my foot would slip into black, quiver- 

 ing mire, thinly veiled by marsh-grasses. When 

 this happened, the whole swamp would shake and 

 chuckle and lap at the skull-shaped tussocks and the 

 bleached skeletons of drowned trees which showed 

 here and there. At last, when I had almost given 

 up hope, I came upon a clump of the regal flowers 

 growing, not in the swamp itself, but on a shaded 

 bank sloping down from the encircling woods. 

 Three of the plants had two flowers each, the rest 

 only one. Among these was a single blossom, pure 

 white without a trace of pink or purple. Although 

 it was only the thirtieth of June, several of the 

 flowers were already slightly withered and past 

 their prime, showing that this orchid is at its best in 

 New Jersey in the middle of June, rather than 

 the end of the month, as in Connecticut. The perfect 

 flowers were beautiful orchids, and had a rich frag- 

 rance which I had never noticed in my Connecticut 



