oes by without my seeing it at all. In autumn
it grows from among dry pine leaves, a slender spike that has
neither root leaves nor stem leaves, but looks like the dried
flower scape of some spring blooming plant. So protective is its
coloration that I stand among its blooms and look long before I
see them at all. It is only by getting very close that one can see
that the tiny forests scattered along the pale brown scape are
themselves beautifully colored with purple and white on the same
soft tan foundation as the scape. They have, too, the quaintly
mysterious formation of all orchid blooms and that alluring,
elusive odor which must be sought intimately to be known. You must
get this dainty perfume where it grows. If you pluck the blooms
and take them home they will hold their beauty and color for days,
but the scent will have strangely slipped from them and trembled
along the still, soft air back to the woodland haunts whence it
came. You might find it there, wandering disconsolate in the
lonely brown spaces seeking for its own heart of bloom, but from
under your roof it has departed.

The flower is a strange one, anyway, in all its growth. Fibrous
roots it has none, just a bunch of coral-like tubercles which draw
nourishment by their own subtle processes from the roots of trees
that shade them. Leaves it has none, just a scarious brown bract
that encloses a part of the stem. Living upon canned food, so to
speak, it has lost its ability to win sustenance from earth and
air. It seems to live, not upon the sap of these trees, but upon
the dead roots and decayed wood, a specially prepared humus
without which it may not thrive, even in its own limited, elusive
way. Among our wild flowers doomed to ultimate extinction I fancy
this will be one of the first to disappear. In the days of great
stretches of moist, deep woodland it may well have flourished. In
my town it is rare and any year I may find it for the last time.
On many counts I would not miss it, and yet that faint, refined
odor which somehow always reminds me of ghosts of mignonette, of
tender, almost forgotten memories once more stirred, gives a
gentle melancholy to the woodland that all the glories of October
will not be able to assuage.

*****

It is by such subtle hints as this that autumn announces her
presence among us. The prevailing tone of the upland wood is yet
that of summer. Hardly will you see a splash of color in all the
miles of green. It is in