decoration, with its four great creamy petals,--flowers they are not,
but floral involucres,--each with a fantastic curl and stain at its tip,
as if the fireflies had alighted on them and scorched them; and yet I
like it best as it peers out in barbaric splendor from the delicate
green of young Maples. And beneath it grows often its more abundant
kinsman, the Dwarf Cornel, with the same four great petals enveloping
its floral cluster, but lingering low upon the ground,--an herb whose
blossoms mimic the statelier tree.

The same rich creamy hue and texture show themselves in the Wild Calla,
which grows at this season in dark, sequestered water-courses, and
sometimes well rivals, in all but size, that superb whiteness out of
a land of darkness, the Ethiopic Calla of the conservatory. At this
season, too, we seek another semi-aquatic rarity, whose homely name
cannot deprive it of a certain garden-like elegance, the Buckbean. This
is one of the shy plants which yet grow in profusion within their own
domain. I have found it of old in Cambridge, and then upon the pleasant
shallows of the Artichoke, that loveliest tributary of the Merrimack,
and I have never seen it where it occupied a patch more than a few yards
square, while yet within that space the multitudinous spikes grow always
tall and close, reminding one of hyacinths, when in perfection, but more
delicate and beautiful. The only locality I know for it in this vicinity
lies seven miles away, where a little inlet from the lower winding bays
of Lake Quinsigamond goes stealing up among a farmer's hay-fields, and
there, close beside the public road and in full of the farm-house, this
rare creature fills the water. But to reach it we commonly row down
the lake to a sheltered lagoon, separated from the main lake by a long
island which is gradually forming itself like the coral isles, growing
each year denser with alder thickets where the king-birds build;--there
leave the boat among the lily-leaves, and take a lane which winds among