The ground in many places was almost a mat of violets, three kinds of which were in special profusion: the tall, fragrant white _Canadensis_, the long-spurred _rostrata_,--of a very pale blue, with darker streaks and a darker centre (like our blue meadow violets in that respect),--and the common _palmata_. The long-spurred violet was new to me, and both for that reason and for itself peculiarly attractive. As I passed up the glen on the right of the brook beyond Hemlock Island, so called, carpeted with partridge-berry vines bearing a wondrous crop (“See the berries!” my notebook says), I began to find here and there the large trillium (_T. grandiflorum_), some of the blossoms clear white, others of a delicate rosy tint. The rosy ones had been open longer than the others, it appeared; for the flowers blush with age,--a very modest and graceful habit. Like the spurred violet, the trillium is a plant also of northern New England, but happily for my present enjoyment I had never seen it there. And the same is to be said of the large yellow bellwort, which was here the trillium’s neighbor, and looked only a little less distinguished than the trillium itself. If I were to name all the plants I saw, or even all that attracted my particular notice, the non-botanical reader would quit me for a tiresome chronicler. Hepatica and bloodroot had dropped their last petals; but anemone and rue anemone were still in bloom, with cranesbill, spring beauty, ragwort, mitrewort, robin’s plantain, Jack-in-the-pulpit, wild ginger (two thick handsome leaves hiding a dark-purplish three-horned urn of an occult and almost sinister aspect), two or more showy chickweeds, two kinds of white stone-crop (_Sedum ternatum_ and _S. Nevii_, the latter a novelty), mandrake (sheltering its precious round bud under an umbrella, though to-day it neither rained nor shone), pepper-root, gill-over-the-ground (where did _it_ come from, I wondered), Dutchman’s breeches (the leaves only), _Orchis spectabilis_ (which I did not know till after a few days it blossomed), and many more. A new shrub--almost a tree--was the bladder-nut, with drooping clusters of small whitish flowers, like bunches of currant blossoms in their manner of growth and general appearance; especially dear to humble-bees, which would not be done with a branch even while I carried it in my hand. In one place, as I stooped to examine a boulder covered thickly with the tiny walking fern, of which the ravine contains a great abundance,--faded, ill conditioned, and homely, but curious, and, better still, a stranger,--I found the ground littered with bright yellowish magnolia petals; and if I looked into the sky for a passing bird, it was almost as likely as not that I should find myself looking through the branches of a soaring tulip-tree,--a piece of magnificence that is one of the most constant of my Alleghanian admirations. All the upper part of the glen is pervaded by a dull rumbling or moaning sound,--the voice of Lost