82 East and West 
Medeola blooms about my door, its shy 
and retiring blossom hid for a time beneath 
its whirls. Indian pipes erect their fragile 
stems of alabaster underneath the hemlocks, 
half buried by old drifts of leaves from 
neighbouring beeches, never presenting them- 
selves to notice but requiring to be sought for. 
Here come wandering bumble-bees and do not 
fail to find them, yet how they should know 
where to look no one can tell, since they 
were not here to look the year before, nor 
will ever be again. But year after year 
Medeolas will come shyly forth, and Indian 
pipes, waiting for bumble-bees. Clintonia 
is, perhaps, the most thoroughly woodsy 
flower of the North and well named borealis. 
It affects the same haunts as the hermit, a 
delectable region of moss-covered boulders 
and logs where stone and wood alike are 
dissolving into moss and fern. To have it 
growing by your door is,—better than any 
tropic flora under glass,—to see a Borean 
flora under the sky; and when in autumn its 
berries wear their celestial blue ’t is as if the 
mountain reflected a bit of the heavens. 
The elevation of my camp is perhaps twen- 
ty-four hundred feet, and of the summit of 
Onteora Mountain, a little over twenty-eight 
