Having gone under the arch (and looked in vain for Washington’s initials on the wall), the visitor to Natural Bridge finds himself following up the brook--a lively stream--between lofty precipitous cliffs, that turn to steep wooded slopes as he proceeds. If he is like me, he pursues the path to the end, stopping here and there,--at the saltpetre cave, at Hemlock Island, and at Lost River, if nowhere else,--till he comes to the end at the falls, a distance of a mile, more or less. That is my way always. I must go straight through the place once; then, the edge of my curiosity dulled, I am in a condition to see and enjoy. The ravine is a botanist’s paradise: that, I should say, must be the first thought of every appreciative tourist. The elevation (fifteen hundred feet), the latitude, and the limestone rocks work together to that end. In a stay of a week I could see, of course, but one set of flowers; and in my preoccupation I passed many herbs and shrubs, mostly out of bloom, the names of which I neither knew nor attempted to discover. One of the things that struck my admiration on the instant was the beauty of the columbine as here displayed; a favorite with me always, for more reasons than one, but never beheld in all its loveliness till now. If the election could be held here, and on the 1st of May, there would be no great difficulty in securing a unanimous vote for _Aquilegia Canadensis_ as the “national flower.” It was in its glory at the time of my earlier visits, brightening the face of the cliffs, not in a mass, but in scattered sprays, as high as the eyesight could follow it; looking, even under the opera-glass, as if it grew out of the rock itself. With it were sedges, ferns, and much of a tufted white flower, which at first I made no question must be the common early saxifrage. When I came upon it within reach, however, I saw at once that it was a plant of quite another sort, some member of the troublesome mustard family,--_Draba ramosissima_, as afterward turned out. It was wonderful how closely it simulated the appearance of _Saxifraga Virginiensis_, though the illusion was helped, no doubt, by the habit I am in of seeing columbine and saxifrage together.