64 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
plant is biennial, at any rate in this latitude. To make dcubly 
sure, however, I am trying my experiments all over again, this 
time in two different localities. I might, here also mention ]\Ir, 
J. Ford Semper's experiment. ^Ir. Semper's home is Aikin, ]\Id. 
Two years ago he planted seed of G. crinita. A number of the 
seeds germinated, but of the lot only one plant reached maturity, 
blooming this year. 
Baltimore, Md. 
CAMP FOLLOWERS OF THE FOREST FIRE. 
By Elsie Murray. 
There are certain fire-swept mountain stretches, solemn, lone- 
some in the early twilight, when the scant moonbeams struggle 
raggedly over their desolation that seem far-reaching barrens, 
pathetic, but for the grandeur of the towering grey skeletons, 
stripped of leaf and bark and silent save for the passionate, des- 
pairing cry of the whip-poor-will. 
But revisit the scene in the gay whirl of a summer's morning 
and presto! change! You'll find the genius loci has dropped her 
tragic mask and the very spirit of comedy is tri])ping it over the 
slopes. The tremulous aspen and her adopted sister, the aspen- 
foliaged birch are rioting in the morning breeze. The torch of 
the great fire weed is lighting up the waste far and wide, and the 
steeple bush and the tall Joe-Pye are echoing its tints of rose and 
lavender. 
Most feminine of trees is Betitla popiilifolia; straight white- 
limbed, supple, with pliant spray and light green foliage, flutter- 
ing, rippling as with laughter in the lightest breeze, and ready to 
go into hysterics, as it were, if the wind persists in teazing her. 
Obedient also to lower her head before the swift summer storm- 
w^ind, till every leaf and branch drifts in the track of the gale. 
How every graceful, yielding motion refutes the myriad-pointed 
menace of her foliage— every leaf of which—as the late ^Mlliam 
Hamilton Gibson once pointed out— is cut in the pattern of the 
deadly Indian arrowhead. At a distance, the black markings on 
_the chalky bark,— the black creases where the trunk springs from 
the soil, the black triangles wherever a limb springs from the 
trunk,— at a distance these smutches tone in with the virgin white 
