MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



year the grass is dried up, and the trees all blacker than in 

 London. The Dearborn Railway Station is a fine building, 

 but the restaurant attached to it is very poor — ragged table- 

 cloths or bare tables, and a general air of shabbiness per- 

 vades it. I did not regret having no business to keep me in 

 Chicago. 



Leaving at noon, I passed through a nearly level country 

 of prairie and wood, with luxuriant meadows near the streams 

 or burnt-up pastures, and reached Trowbridge Station at 5.30, 

 where I was met by Mr. Cook, with whom I was to stay. 

 We had supper, of tea, fruit, etc., and I afterwards tried their 

 stereopticon lantern, which was very poor. The next evening 

 (Friday) I gave my lecture on "Darwinism," and offered to give 

 that on " Colours of Animals " on Monday evening as a return 

 for their hospitality. The next morning Professor Beal took 

 me to a fine bit of original swamp forest, with features which 

 were quite new to me. Throughout my wanderings in the 

 Sierra and the Rockies I had never met with any sphagnum 

 moss, which I should often have been glad of to pack my 

 plants in. In this bit of forest, however, there were acres of 

 such sphagnum as I had never seen before, forming a con- 

 tinuous carpet more than a foot thick, and in this congenial 

 rooting medium there were numbers of very interesting plants. 

 American pitcher-plants (sarracenia) were abundant, but what 

 pleased me more were quantities of the elegant orchis 

 {Habenaria ciliaris\ with curious fringed flowers, making quite 

 a sheet of yellow in places, its tubers not in the soil, but 

 embedded in the sphagnum a few inches below the surface. 

 There was also a curious little plant called gold-thread, allied 

 to the hellebore, and a number of ferns. Among the shrubs 

 were tall vacciniums, and the beautiful red-berried Nemo- 

 panthes canadensis^ allied to the holly, but deciduous. 



On Sunday I saw the botanical garden attached to the 

 college, the library, and the insect collections, which latter 

 were very fine as compared with our English species. Of 

 moths of the genus Catocala, instead of our four species there 

 were about twenty, many of them much larger and more 

 gorgeously coloured, while the Saturnias and other groups 



