The only trees I remember at the very top of the mountain were a few dwarfed and distorted pines and white oaks,--enough to remind a Yankee that he was not in New Hampshire. On the other hand, here grew our Massachusetts huckleberry (_Gaylussacia resinosa_), which I had seen nowhere below, where a great abundance of the buckberry--so I think I heard it called (_G. ursina_),--taller bushes, more comfortable to pick from, with larger blossoms--seemed to have taken its place. I should have been glad to try the fruit, which was described as of excellent quality. On that point, with no thought of boasting, I could have spoken as an expert. With the huckleberry was chokeberry, another New England acquaintance, fair to look upon, but a hypocrite,--“by their fruits ye shall know them;” and underneath, among the stones, were common yellow five-fingers, birdfoot violets, and leaves of trailing arbutus, three-toothed potentilla (a true mountain-lover), checker-berry, and galax. With them, but deserving a sentence by themselves, were the exquisite vernal iris and the scarlet painted-cup, otherwise known as the Indian’s paint-brush and prairie fire, splendid for color, and in these parts, to my astonishment, a frequenter of the forest. I should have looked for it only in grassy meadows. Here and there grew close patches of the pretty, alpine-looking sand myrtle (_Leiophyllum buxifolium_), thickly covered with small white flowers,--a plant which I had seen for the first time the day before on the summit of Whiteside. Mountain heather I called it, finding no English name in Chapman’s Flora. Stunted laurel bushes in small bud were scattered over the summit. A little later they would make the place a flower garden. A single rose-acacia tree had already done its best in that direction, with a full crop of gorgeous rose-purple clusters. The winds had twisted it and kept it down, but could not hinder its fruitfulness.