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 
