46 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
hues increases ; delicate purple Orchises bloom 
in their chosen haunts, and Wild Roses blush 
over hill and dale. On peat-meadows the Ad- 
der’s-tongue Arethusa (now called Pogonia) 
flowers profusely, with a faint, delicious per- 
fume, —and its more elegant cousin, the Calo- 
pogon, by its side. In this vicinity we miss 
the blue Harebell, the identical harebell of 
Ellen Douglas, which I remember as waving 
its exquisite flowers along the banks of the 
Merrimack, and again at Brattleborough, below 
the cascade in the village, where it has climbed 
the precipitous sides of old buildings, and nods 
inaccessibly from their crevices, in that pictur- 
esque spot, looking down on the hurrying river. 
But with this exception there is nothing want- 
ing here of the familiar flowers of early sum- 
mer. 
The more closely one studies Nature, the 
finer her adaptations grow. For instance, the 
change of seasons is analogous to a change of 
zones, and summer assimilates our vegetation 
to that of the tropics. In those lands, Hum- 
boldt has remarked, one misses the beauty of 
wild-flowers in the grass, because the luxuriance 
of vegetation develops everything into shrubs. 
The form and color are beautiful, “but, being 
too high above the soil, they disturb that har- 
monious proportion which characterizes the 
