ROYAL FAMILY OF ORCHIDS. 



95 



their beauty has proved their own destruction. We 

 are told that the brilliant butterfly-weed or orange 

 milk-weed once grew in the Gully leading to the 

 Plains, but it long ago sought a more secluded retreat, 

 and is now rarely found about Concord except in gar- 

 dens. At Three-Mile Island in Lake Winnepesau- 

 kee, the summer camp of the Appalachian Mountain 

 Club, all the wild flowers are jealously guarded, and 

 not a shrub can be cut without permission. In July, 

 1905, the writer found the small green orchid, Micros- 

 tylis ophioglossoides, at Three-Mile and also at Ossi- 

 pee Park ; but when she inquired the exact location of 

 the ram's-head orchid, Cypripedium arietinwm, whose 

 delicate beauty might attract the flower gatherer, she 

 was told that the single patch of it on Three-Mile was 

 carefully guarded. She was permitted just one look 

 at the sacred precincts — under escort; and saw about 

 twenty dried seed-vessels, for the flower blooms in 

 May. 



Most of us have to learn consideration through 

 losses. The writer confesses with shame that she once 

 filled a rose bowl with calopogons and pogonias, just 

 as a parlor decoration ; but in 1899 when she saw the 

 little northern bog orchis, Hahenaria obtusata, on the 

 North Woodstock path near the summit of Moosilauke, 



