Then there was the day in the depths of the pine-barrens, where stunted, three-leaved pitch pines took the place of the towering, five-leaved white pine of the North. The woods looked like a shimmering pool of changing greens lapping over a white sand-land that had been thrust up from the South into the very heart of the North. I followed a winding wood-path along the high bank of a stream stained brown and steeped sweet with a million cedar-roots. A mountain laurel showed like a beautiful ghost against the dark water—a glory of white, pink-flecked flowers.
Through dripping branches of withewood and star-leaved sweet-gum saplings the path twisted. Suddenly, at the very edge of the bank, out of a mass of hollow, crimson-streaked leaves filled with clear water, swung two glorious blossoms. Wine-red, aquamarine, pearl-white, and pale gold they gleamed and nodded from slender stems. It was the pitcher-plant, which I had never seen in blossom before.
From the stream the hidden path wound through thicket after thicket, sweet as spring, with the fragrance of the wild magnolia and the spicery of the gray-green bayberry. Its course was marked with white sand, part of the bed of some sea forgotten a hundred thousand years ago. By the side of the path showed the vivid crimson-lake leaves of the wild ipecac, with its strange green flowers; while everywhere, as if set in snow, gleamed the green-and-gold of the Hudsonia, the barrens-heather. The plants looked like tiny cedar trees laden down with thickly set blossoms of pure gold, which the wind spilled in little yellow drifts on the white sand. In the distance, through the trees, were glimpses of meadows, hazy-purple with the blue toad-flax. Beside the path showed here and there the pale gold of the narrow-leaved sundrops, with deep-orange stamens. Beyond were masses of lambskill, with its fatal leaves and crimson blossoms.
On and on the path led, past jade-green pools in which gleamed buds of the yellow pond-lily, like lumps of floating gold. Among them were blossoms of the paler golden-club, which looked like the tongue of a calla lily. At last the path stretched straight toward the flat-topped mound that showed dim and fair through the low trees. The woods became still. Even the Maryland yellow-throat stopped singing, the prairie warbler no longer drawled his lazy notes, and the chewink, black and white and red all over, like the newspaper in the old conundrum, stopped calling his name from the thickets and singing, “Drink your tea!”
I knew that at last I had come upon a fairy hill, such an one wherein the shepherd heard a host of tiny voices singing a melody so haunting sweet that he always after remembered it, and which has since come down to us of to-day as the tune of Robin Adair. Listen as I would, however, there was no sound from the depths of this hill. Perhaps the sun was too high, for the fairy-folk sing best in late twilight or early dawn.
The mound, like all fairy hills, was guarded. The path ran into a tangle of sand-myrtle, with vivid little oval green leaves and feathery white, pink-centred blossoms. Just beyond stood a bush of poison-sumac. Pushing aside the fierce branches, I went unscathed up the mound. At its very edge was another sentry. From under my feet sounded a deep, fierce hiss, and there across the path stretched the great body of a pine snake fully six feet long, all cream-white and umber-brown. Raising its strange pointed head, with its gold and black eyes, it hissed fearsomely. I had learned, however, that a pine snake’s hiss is worse than its bite and, when I poked its rough, mottled body with my foot, it gave up pretending to be a dangerous snake and lazily moved off to some spot where it would not be disturbed by intruding humans.
The pyxies had carpeted the side of the mound thick with their wine-red and green moss, starred with hundreds of flat, five-petaled white blossoms. This celebrated pyxie moss is not a moss at all, but a tiny shrub. Near the summit of the mound the path was lost in a foam of the blue, lilac, and white butterfly blossoms of the lupine. Little clouds of fragrance drifted through the air, as the wind swayed rows and rows of the transparent bells of the leucothoe. Beyond the lupine stood a rank of dazzling white turkey-beards, the xerophyllum of the botanists. The inmost circle of the mound was carpeted with dry gray reindeer moss, and before me, in the centre of the circle, drooped on slender stems seven rose-red moccasin flowers.
They have sought him high, they have sought him low,
They have sought him over down and lea;
They have found him by the milk-white thorn