Atlantic Classics, Second Series

by Unknown

One July day I traveled from Quebec to Portland on the slowest of trains. The road ran for much of the way, first on one side, then on the other, of the Chaudière River, but never far out of sight of its clear brown waters. Fortunately for me, our locomotive used wood for fuel, and consequently every few hours we would stop at some great woodpile in a forest clearing while the trainmen threw a fresh supply of wood into the tender; and some of the passengers took advantage of the stop to make short explorations into the forest. About mid-day, as we were riding slowly along, I began to notice a pink-purple flower that was new to me, growing here and there in rather marshy places. Shortly after I had first seen the flower the added slowness of the train showed that we were coming to another woodpile. The instant the train stopped I was out of the cars, over the low rail fence, and picking my way carefully from grassy hummock to grassy hummock; and soon I had found a specimen. Upon analysis it proved to be calopogon, familiar to all New Englanders from childhood, but new to my Ohio eyes.

I have never made any formal herbarium, and the only botanical record I have ever kept consists of the date and place of my first seeing the flower written opposite its scientific name in the margin of the pages of my old school-girl's copy of Gray's Botany. But that is the only record one needs to whom all the flowers one knows are either old friends or new acquaintances—in either case distinct individuals. Often, as I have been turning the pages of the old botany in a bit of analyzing, I have stopped at the page on which is written, opposite the scientific name of the calopogon, 'Saint Henry's, Canada, July 11, 1884'; and across the more than twenty years that lie between, I smell once more the balsam of the Canadian forest, and see the amber-brown waters of the Chaudière River, and hear the shouts of the trainmen as they throw the great sticks of wood up to the tender; and giving color to all this mental picture is the pink-purple blossom of the calopogon.

But all trains do not have the accommodating habit of stopping for wood just after you have seen a strange flower; in that case, all that you can do is, take the best mental landmarks you can, and then at the first opportunity go back for your specimen. One summer I was going down on the express from Philadelphia to Cape May. As you near the coast the road runs through very level country, and between the railway and the pine wood lies a strip of marshy ground about forty feet wide. Each year, as I go back to the sea-coast, I watch eagerly for my first sight of the two characteristic flowers of the Jersey coast, the swamp mallow and the sabbatia. On this particular morning I had already seen many of the great mallows with their rose-pink flowers, so like those of the hollyhock that not even the most careless eye can fail to notice the family resemblance; and I had welcomed them as a sure sign of the fast-nearing seashore.

Now, with my face, as usual, close to the window, I was watching the sparse marsh-grass most narrowly to see if I could detect amidst it the pink star-shaped flower of the sabbatia. Suddenly the marsh-grass was set thick with spikes of yellow flowers, just rising above the level of the grass. There was only that one hurried look as the train went by; but from that look I felt almost certain of two things: the first was that I had never seen that flower before, and the second, that it must be close of kin to an old flower friend of mine, the white fringed-orchis.

Then and there I determined to get that flower, and the first thing was to make sure of its location. At first this seemed almost hopeless, since for miles back we had had that narrow strip of marsh-grass flanked by the unchanging pine woods; but in a few minutes our road passed under another railway; here was one landmark, and in a couple of minutes more we went past a way-station slowly enough for me to read the name on the board; now I knew that I could find my plant. The next day we took one of the local trains from Cape May, got off at the station whose name I had read, and started down the track. After a walk of a mile we passed under that other railroad; and about two miles farther down the track I saw again the yellow spikes of the flowers barely o'er-topping the grass.

It had been a hot July morning with a sultry land breeze blowing, and as we walked the three miles down the unshaded track, we had weariedly and unavailingly slapped at mosquitoes at every step. All of these discomforts together had not daunted my courage; but the swarms of mosquitoes that arose buzzing at my first step into the marsh-grass made me draw back to the comparative security of the railway track, with the feeling that no flower could repay one for facing those swarms. A second look at the yellow flowers growing not thirty feet away gave me fresh courage and I started again. I was as quick as possible; but when I was back once more on the track, this time with my hands full of the flowers, face and hands and arms were one mass of blotches from the mosquito bites.

Upon analysis the flower proved to be the yellow fringed-orchis, the handsomest species of its genus, and the one most closely allied to the white fringed-orchis. Our train had been running about forty miles an hour; I had never even known that there was a yellow orchid, but in that one quick glance from the express train the unmistakable family look of the orchis had shown.

Success and pleasure in car-window botany depend not so much on a scientific knowledge of structural details as on the ability of the eye to recognize at a glance the characteristic effect produced by a mass of details. It is this ability which enables you to be sure that you recognize the faces of old flower friends in the hurried glance cast from the window; which enables you to tell with certainty gray-blue clump of houstonias from gray-blue clump of hepaticas, wind-swept bank of purplish phlox from wind-swept bank of wild geranium; and it is that same ability to recognize the characteristic effect produced by a group of structural details which enables one to place without analysis the new flower in the right family.

I have always been secretly very proud of the certainty with which at the first sight of the yellow flower I felt that it was an orchis, but all my feeling in connection with it is not that of pleasure. Certain flowers always recall to me certain sounds; in most cases the sound associated with a flower is the one heard at the time at which I first saw the flower; and to this day, with the thought of the yellow fringed-orchis is inseparably joined that most persistent and irritating of sounds, the buzzing of the mosquito.

But the true history of a car-window botanist is not always a record of successful achievement, of the triumphant finding of his flower; he also has his haunting disappointments, his glimpses of strange flowers which he is never afterwards able to place. One July day, riding through northern New Hampshire, I saw just over the fence at the edge of the woods a tall plant—evidently some kind of a lily. It bore a single dark orange-red flower, which did not droop as do the flowers of the meadow lily, but stood stiffly erect. I have never seen that lily since; though never does a July come, especially if it is to be spent in a new place, that I do not think, 'Maybe this year I shall find my lily.' Perhaps, after all, such experiences are not to be classed with the disappointments either of life or of car-window botany—is it not rather true that to both they give zest and expectancy?