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. 
