ORCHID-HUNTING 159 
path would disappear from sight in masses of hud- 
sonia and sand-myrtle. Everywhere above the 
blueberry bushes flamed the regal Turk’s-cap lily, 
with its curved fire-red petals. On high the stalks 
towered above a tangle of lesser plants bearing 
great candelabra of glorious blossoms. 
Finally, we came to a little ditch which some for- 
gotten cranberry-grower had dug through the barrens 
to a long-deserted bog. On its side grew the rare 
thread-leafed sundew, with its long  thread-like 
leaf covered with tiny red hairs and speckled thick 
with glittering drops of dew; while here and there 
little insects, which had alighted on the sweet, fatal 
drops, were enmeshed in the entangling hairs. Well 
above the line of strangled insects on which it fed, 
a pink blossom smiled unconcernedly. Like the at- 
tractive lady mentioned in Proverbs, her house goes 
down into the chambers of death. 
As we followed the dike, the air was sweet with the 
perfume of white alder. The long stream of brown 
cedar-water was starred white with gleaming, fra- 
grant water-lilies. In a marsh by the ditch grew 
clumps of cotton-grass or pussytoes, each stem of 
which bore a tuft of soft brown wool, like the down 
which a mother rabbit pulls from her breast when 
she lines her nest for her babies. 
At last we came to the abandoned cranberry bog. 
Suddenly the Botanist jumped into the ditch, 
splashed his way across, and disappeared in the bog, 
waving his arms over his head. I found him on his 
knees in the wet sphagnum moss, chanting ecstati- 
