The Swamp’s Lure 
fumes none wears better than this: it never cloys but is 
ahvays tonic, feeding the sinews of a man’s spirit. Here 
in the swamp autumnal fires are earliest kindled flaming 
scarlet in the foliage of red maple and sour gum and sumac; 
for the nights fall chill here and it will be in such lowlands 
that we shall see the first hoar frost of the season lying. 
Redder than any color in leaf of trees is the brilliant hue 
of the cardinal flowers which gleam among the browning 
grasses by the water, and with them we shall likely find a 
blossom of duller red, that of the meadow beauty, or deer 
grass as it used to be called in the West. This latter plant 
has a peculiar charm in its seed vessel, which is shaped like 
some slender vase with a flush of rosy color spread over it. 
Interesting, too, are the chocolate brown clusters of the 
groundnut’s flowers, swinging from the bushes over which 
this vine delights to clamber. This, by the way, is not the 
groundnut of commerce, but a kindred plant with an edible 
tuberous root, which has probably only escaped being a 
table favorite because the catalogue of American vegetables 
is already too crowded to make a place for it. 
The swamp is indeed a paradise for vines, among them 
the bur cucumber. This rank-growing plant, swinging 
itself upward and onward by its forked tendrils, covers 
considerable areas with a cheerful coverlet of prosperous- 
looking green. It is an annual and lives its short life mer¬ 
rily; for not only does it attain a great length—sometimes 
even sixty feet or more—in its four or five months of grow¬ 
ing, but it bobs up in all sorts of unexpected places, and, 
not content with its native swamp, pre-empts land that the 
owner had designed for other purposes. Thus, you find 
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