164 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
but thereafter I was obliged to hitch my horse and follow an 
unblazed trail, through overgrown wood roads and over moss- 
grown rocks and fallen trees, until I soon completely lost my 
way, my progress being further besieged by every conceivable 
sort of mountain bloom to tempt my loitering. 
But I must have scented my goal unknown from afar, and at 
length, after a hard scramble, was rewarded with a glimpse of it 
through the trees. It was the first real important mountain bog 
that I had visited. I was prepared for a surprise, but it came in 
a shape unsuspected. Almost my first glimpse had offered me a 
puzzle as I looked down upon the tarn beneath the crags, its 
broad shores impurpled with a composite hue whose elements | 
could not guess. With eager approach I was soon penetrating 
the border jungle of clethra, Cassandra, and bay—as I now recall 
them—whose roots were embedded in the cushioned sphagnum ; 
and having passed the guard, emerged to find myself in a sea of 
purple pitcher-plants; no beggarly cluster of the hot-house, but 
a compact throng, extending, I had almost said, for acres on all 
sides, each cluster crowding among its fellows, and presided over 
by its company of strange nodding lurid blossoms, and all im- 
pacted in the dense moss. 
It was some little time before I regained my composure suff- 
ciently to scrape acquaintance with my new friends, who seemed 
very hospitably inclined, literally dancing on all sides at my ap- 
proach on the quaking bog, and at length becoming very com- 
municative, drenching my feet at every step with the anointing 
from their brimming amphore. 
I remember turning the averted face of the blossom, and won- 
dering whether I could ever coax it to divulge to me the mystery 
of that singular large disk-shaped stigma which covers a well-kept 
secret not yet disclosed to the analyst. 
Those conscious, thinking pitchers, too, artful pitfalls, each 
with its disintegrating mass of insect victims! That net-work of 
turgid lurid veins upon the hollow leaf seems a fitting commentary 
on their carnivorous lives! Examination of these pitchers dis- 
closed another fact which has probably been noted before, but of 
