To one born by the salt water there is
an especial forest delight in the pine woods. For that best-loved sound
of the ceaseless fall of plunging seas upon the beach comes to him
there. Many a time I have walked from Harvard's leafy shades and
cheerful halls out to the quiet of the Botanic Garden for the sake of
hearing the wind in the pine tree-tops. Shut your eyes, and the inward
vision sees once more the long line of sandy and shingly beaches, the
green curving-up of the surges tipped with dazzling foam,--sees the
motionless and blackened timbers of the wreck on the shore, the white
wings dipping and turning along the combing tops of the waves racing in
upon the sands,--sees the dry tufted beach-grass, and the wet, shining,
compact slope down which slides swiftly the under-tow. And what a
healthful exhilaration it is to breathe the balm-laden breath of the
pine forest, and to tread the elastic slippery-soft carpet of the fallen
spiny leaves! Here is the haunt of the lady-slipper, (_cypripedium_,)
a shy, rare flower, like a little sack delicately veined, with a faint
musky scent, and large-flapped leaves shading its flower.

In the hot July and August, the scarlet lobelia, the cardinal-flower, is
to be found. Never was cardinal so robed. If Herbert's rose, in poetic
hyperbole, with its "hue angry and brave, bids the rash gazer wipe his
eye," certainly such a bed of lobelia as I once saw on the road to
"Rollo's Camp" was anything but what the Scotch would call "a sight for
sair een." For the space of a dozen or twenty yards grew a patch of
absolutely nothing but lobelia. At a little distance it was like a
scarlet carpet flung out by the roadside. If you desire to twine the
threefold chord of color, as Mr. Ruskin calls it, I know of no lovelier
foil for the lobelia than the white orchis, which haunts the same marshy
spots. Those long spikes of feathery and balanced blossoms are the most
absolute white of anything in Nature. They positively insist upon the
very refinement of purity, as you look at them.

Did you ever see a pond-lily?--not the miserable draggled
green-and-mud-colored buds which enterprising boys bring into the cars
for sale; but the white water-lily, floating on the silent brooks, or
far out in the safe depths of the mill-ponds. The "Autocrat" knows what
pond-lilies are, having visited Prospero's Isle and seen the pink-tinged
sisterhood of a certain mere that lies embosomed in its hills. But to
know them