The Night-Bloomers 
almost nauseates you—a cross between the odor of lemon 
verbena and that of a certain obnoxious bug not mentioned 
in polite society, but which the dictionary tells about under 
the word cimex. The plant is known by many names, 
such as horse-balm, richweed, knotweed and stoneroot. 
The last is suggested by the hard lumpy root, which a 
penknife can scarcely cut into, and which if hammered 
breaks up into flinty fragments like stone indeed. The 
plant has long enjoyed a reputation for medicinal virtue, the 
Indians employing it for the cure of sores and wounds, and 
the whites, particularly in the southern mountains, using 
it in home-made decoctions for fevers, colic and indigestion. 
The bees are very fond of visiting the blossoms, and one 
often sees the big fellows in apparent ecstasy hanging up¬ 
side down from the small flowers, which are borne down by 
the insects’ weight. 
September io. —There is a class of plants which one is 
inclined to think would have been strongly disapproved 
by Julius Caesar, whose liking in men was for *‘such as 
sleep o’ nights.” These are those owls among flowers, 
the night-bloomers, like the evening primrose, which we all 
know both as a garden plant and as roadside weed. 
One of the most beautiful of such flowers of the dark 
that grow wild in America and dispense sweetness to 
prowlers in the night is the white or night-blooming cam¬ 
pion, which blooms with us until the October frosts come. 
It is usually found in waste grounds about seaboard cities, 
where it loves to live in a tangle of old weeds—a dull 
enough place by day, but when the sun gets low filled like 
the night sky with the glory of a thousand eyes. The 
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