THE QUEEN OF THE SWAMP 



EVEN Matthew Arnold, who once spent a sum- 

 mer in Stockbridge, condescended to speak 

 a good word for the Berkshire flora. Per- 

 haps, after that, for any one else to commend our 

 wild flowers is to paint the wood-lily. Yet we 

 have certain gems that possibly even Mr. Arnold 

 did not find — in person, at any rate — and certain 

 secret wild gardens which his British boots did not 

 invade to sanctify — places which are nevertheless 

 full of woodland sweetness and dappled light. 

 There is, for example, Bartholomew's Cobble — not 

 a difficult spot to find, should I tell you how to 

 reach it, which I have no intention of doing. Bar- 

 tholomew's Cobble is a limestone formation rising 

 in sharp little cliffs directly out of a sickle-shaped 

 bend in the river, its white promontories picked 

 out with green moss and crowned with pines and 

 cedars. Back from the edge of the banks the 

 cobble is a maze of flower-sprinkled lawns — the 

 close, clean pasture turf which is found around lime- 

 stone — running in and out among white ledges and 

 gray boulders, sentineled by pines and dark, trim 

 cedars, and bordered, along the rocks, by beds of 

 fern and banks of moss. It is here that a woman 

 once found that hybrid between the walking-fern 

 (Camptosorus) and the ebony spleenwort (Asplen- 

 ium platyneuron) , called the Asplenium ebonoides. 



