274 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
many smaller museums and private collections, and 
they have been shown in the great expositions of the 
world, where we are told their absence would leave a 
vacancy that could not be filled. 
Hunting in these later days has been transferred 
almost entirely from the destruction of animals to 
the finer sport of finding and treasuring precious 
stones and rare or beautiful plants. The animals 
that once abounded here are practically gone. The 
crystals, hidden away in the recesses of the earth and 
affording more difficult hunting, are only beginning 
to be objects of general interest. But the plants 
have long attracted attention, and the beautiful 
Sapphire Country, with its sparkling waters, its 
crystal flowers of the rocks, and its glorious plant 
flowers, is the home of a beautiful little blossom 
which has the most romantic history of any flower in 
the mountains, it having been the quest for nearly 
half a century of every botanist who came hunting 
to this paradise for botanists. It is the Shortia galaci- 
folia, with a leaf closely resembling the galax, to 
whose botanical family it belongs, but which, instead 
of blossoming in a spike of small white flowers, bears 
a single large and beautiful white or pink blossom on 
a slender stem. The flowers, with their delicate wavy 
petals standing close together above the clustered 
leaves, are extremely beautiful, although it was not 
this beauty that at first excited interest in the plant 
that became an object of eager quest long before any 
one had so much as seen its flowers! 
It was more than a hundred years ago that the 
