1 64 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 







but thereafter I was obliged to hitch my horse and follow an 

 unblazed trail, through overgrown wood roads and over moss- 

 grown rocks and fallen trees, until I soon completely lost my 

 way, my progress being further besieged by every conceivable 

 sort of mountain bloom to tempt my loitering. 



But I must have scented my goal unknown from afar, and at 

 length, after a hard scramble, was rewarded with a glimpse of it 

 through the trees. It was the first real important mountain bog 

 that I had visited. I was prepared for a surprise, but it came in 

 a shape unsuspected. Almost my first glimpse had offered me a 

 puzzle as I looked down upon the tarn beneath the crags, its 

 broad shores impurpled with a composite hue whose elements ! 

 could not guess. With eager approach I was soon penetrating 

 the border jungle of clethra, Cassandra, and bay as I now recall 

 them whose roots were embedded in the cushioned sphagnum; 

 and having passed the guard, emerged to find myself in a sea of 

 purple pitcher-plants; no beggarly cluster of the hot-house, but 

 a compact throng, extending, I had almost said, for acres on all 

 sides, each cluster crowding among its fellows, and presided over 

 by its company of strange nodding lurid blossoms, and all im- 

 pacted in the dense moss. 



It was some little time before I regained my composure suffi- 

 ciently to scrape acquaintance with my new friends, who seemed 

 very hospitably inclined, literally dancing on all sides at my ap- 

 proach on the quaking bog, and at length becoming very com- 

 municative, drenching my feet at every step with the anointing 

 from their brimming amphorae. 



I remember turning the averted face of the blossom, and won- 

 dering whether I could ever coax it to divulge to me the mystery 

 of that singular large disk-shaped stigma which covers a well-kept 

 secret not yet disclosed to the analyst. 



Those conscious, thinking pitchers, too, artful pitfalls, each 

 with its disintegrating mass of insect victims! That net- work of 

 turgid lurid veins upon the hollow leaf seems a fitting commentary 

 on their carnivorous lives! Examination of these pitchers dis- 

 closed another fact which has probably been noted before, but of 



