On a later occasion--for thus encouraged I called more than once afterward at the same house--the lady handed me an orchid. I might be interested in it; it was not very common, she believed. I looked at it, thinking at first that I had never seen it before. Then I seemed to remember something. “Is it _Pogonia verticillata_?” I asked. She smiled, and said it was; and when I told her that to the best of my recollection I had never seen more than one specimen before, and that upwards of twenty years ago (a specimen from Blue Hill, Massachusetts), she insisted upon believing that I must have an extraordinary botanical memory, though of course she did not put the compliment thus baldly, but dressed it in some graceful, unanswerable, feminine phrase which I, for all my imaginary mnemonic powers, have long ago forgotten. The same lady had the rare _Shortia galacifolia_ growing--transplanted--in her grounds, and her husband volunteered to show me one of the few places in the neighborhood of Highlands (this, too, on his own land) where the true lily-of-the-valley--identical with the European plant of our gardens--grows wild. It was something I had greatly desired to see, and was now in bloom. Still another man--but he was only a summer cottager--took me to look at a specimen of the Carolina hemlock (_Tsuga Caroliniana_), a tree of the very existence of which I had before been ignorant. The truth is that the region is most exceptionally rich in its flora, and the people, to their honor be it recorded, are equally exceptional in that they appreciate the fact. A small magnolia-tree (_M. Fraseri_), in bloom everywhere along the brooksides, did not attract me to any special degree till one day, in an idle hour at Stewart’s Pond, I plucked a half-open bud. I thought I had never known so rare a fragrance; delicate and wholesome beyond comparison, and yet most deliciously rich and fruity, a perfume for the gods. The leaf, too, now that I came really to look at it, was of an elegant shape and texture, untoothed, but with a beautiful “auriculated” base, as Latin-loving botanists say, from which the plant derives its vernacular name,--the ear-leaved umbrella-tree. The waxy blossoms seemed to be quite scentless, but I wished that Thoreau, whose nose was as good as his eyes and his ears, could have smelled of the buds.