26 THROUGH GLADE AND MEAD. 
favored latitudes, on almost the same parallel with 
Constantinople, Rome, Madrid, seats of the Old World 
civilization’s bright consummate flower, it is not strange 
that our flora should be a varied one, partaking of both 
a northern and a southern character and containing 
species of world-wide distribution, with tropical and 
polar kindred. One never realizes how varied and 
abundant it is until some especial opportunity or some 
especial interest leads him to investigate carefully. 
Then, as the eye sees what it is looking for, ever new 
and farther-reaching vistas open before it, and the dis- 
tant seems to come near. 
Ralph Cranfield, in Hawthorne’s fairy legend of 
“The Three-fold Destiny,” finds at the very door of his 
mother’s dwelling the treasure he has sought in world- 
wide wanderings. One of my friends who has sailed 
toward the far North, to the Greenland coast, has often 
told me of the strangeness of that wild land where, close 
to the foot of the great blue ice-masses, the bright sum- 
mer flowers bloom; he had brought home sprays of 
one of those humble shrubs which, without blossoms, 
we had concluded must be the Labrador tea (Ledum 
latifolium, Ait.). In that now classic work, the “Florula 
Bostoniensis,” the third and best edition of which ap- 
peared in 1840, Dr. Bigelow describes the Labrador tea, 
but is obliged to refer to Mount Monadnock and the 
White Mountains as its nearest known habitats. Six 
