For a long time they all watched the birds and made notes, until the dimming light warned them that it was time to be on their way. In the twilight the hylas called across the marshes, and from upland meadows scores of meadow-larks cried, “Swee-eet, swee-eet.” Westering down the sky sank the crescent new moon, with blazing Jupiter in her train. As the Band climbed Violet Hill and swung into the long lane which ended in home, they heard the last and loveliest bird-song of that whole dear day. Through the gathering darkness came a sweet and dreamy croon, the love-song of the little owl. Even as they listened, the distant door of the house opened and, framed in the lamp-light, waiting for them, was Mother, the best treasure of all.
[IX]
ORCHID-HUNTING
My path led down the side of the lonely Barrack, as the coffin-shaped hill had been named. There I had been exploring a little mountain stream, which I had fondly and mistakenly hoped might prove to be a trout-brook. The winding wood-road passed through dim aisles of whispering pine trees. At a steep place, a bent green stem stretched half across the path, and from it swayed a rose-red flower like a hollow sea-shell carved out of jacinth. For the first time I looked down on the moccasin flower or pink lady-slipper (Cypripedium acaule), the largest of our native orchids.
For a long time I hung over the flower. Its discovery was a great moment, one of those that stand out among the thirty-six-odd million of minutes that go to make up a long life. For the first time my eyes were opened to see what a lovely thing a flower could be. In the half-light I knelt on the soft pine-needles and studied long the hollow purple-pink shell, veined with crimson, set between two other tapering petals of greenish-purple, while a sepal of the same color curved overhead. The whole flower swayed between two large curved, grooved leaves.
Leaving the path, I began to hunt for others under the great trees, and at last came upon a whole congregation nodding and swaying in long rows around the vast trunks of white pines which were old trees when this country was born.
From that day I became a hunter of orchids and a haunter of far-away forests and lonely marshlands and unvisited hill-tops and mountain-sides. Wherever the lovely hid-folk dwell, there go I. They are strange flowers, these orchids. When first they were made out of sunshine, mist, and dew, every color was granted them save one. They may wear snow-white, rose-red, pearl and gold, green and white, purple and gold, ivory and rose, yellow, gold and brown, every shade of crimson and pink. Only the blues are denied them.
Since that first great day I have found the moccasin flower in many places—on the top of bare hills and in the black-lands of northern Canada, where, four feet under the peat, the ice never melts even in midsummer. Once I saw it by a sphagnum bog where I was hunting for the almost unknown nest of the Tennessee warbler, amid clouds of black flies and mosquitoes that stung like fire. Again, on the tip-top of Mount Pocono in Pennsylvania, I had just found the long-sought nest of a chestnut-sided warbler. Even as I admired the male bird, with his white cheeks and golden head and chestnut-streaked sides, and the four eggs like flecked pink pearls, my eye caught a sight which brought me to my knees regardless for a moment of nest, eggs, birds, and all. Among rose-hearted twin-flowers and wild lilies of the valley and snowy dwarf cornels swung three moccasin flowers in a line. The outer ones, like the guard-stars of great Altair, were light in color. Between them gleamed, like the Eagle Star itself, a flower of deepest rose, an unearthly crystalline color, like a rain-drenched jacinth.
Another time, at the crest of a rattlesnake den, I found two of these pink pearls of the woods swinging above the velvet-black coils of a black timber rattlesnake. I picked my way down the mountain-side, with Beauty in one hand and Death in the other, as I romantically remarked to the unimpressed snake-collector who was waiting for me with an open gunny-sack.