at was so. Some seasons the sugar maple yields
much sweeter sap than in others; and even individual trees, owing to
the soil, moisture, etc., where they stand, show a great difference in
this respect. The same is doubtless true of the sweet-scented flowers.
I had always supposed that our Canada violet--the tall, leafy-stemmed
white violet of our Northern woods--was odorless, till a correspondent
called my attention to the contrary fact. On examination I found that,
while the first ones that bloomed about May 25 had very sweet-scented
foliage, especially when crushed in the hand, the flowers were
practically without fragrance. But as the season advanced the
fragrance developed, till a single flower had a well-marked perfume,
and a handful of them was sweet indeed. A single specimen, plucked
about August 1, was quite as fragrant as the English violet, though
the perfume is not what is known as violet, but, like that of the
hepatica, comes nearer to the odor of certain fruit-trees.

It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of our sugar maple are
sweet-scented; the perfume seems to become stale after a few days:
but pass under this tree just at the right moment, say at nightfall on
the first or second day of its perfect inflorescence, and the air is
loaded with its sweetness; its perfumed breath falls upon you as its
cool shadow does a few weeks later.

After the linnaea and the arbutus, the prettiest sweet-scented
flowering vine our woods hold is the common mitchella vine, called
squaw-berry and partridge-berry. It blooms in June, and its twin
flowers, light cream-color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most agreeable
fragrance.

Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the European, and many of
ours are fragrant. The first to bloom in the spring is the showy
orchis, though it is far less showy than several others. I find it in
May, not on hills, where Gray says it grows, but in low, damp places
in the woods. It has two oblong shining leaves, with a scape four or
five inches high strung with sweet-scented, pink-purple flowers. I
usually find it and the fringed polygala in bloom at the same time;
the lady's-slipper is a little later. The purple fringed orchis, one
of the most showy and striking of all our orchids, blooms in midsummer
in swampy meadows and in marshy, grassy openings in the woods,
shooting up a tapering column or cylinder of pink-purple fringed
flowers, that one may see at quite a distance, and the per