Later in the month I made another trip to secure some ferns for photographing. It was Sunday, and the church bells were ringing at North Corners as I drove into the valley, and hitched my horse opposite the village inn. As I went my way toward the haunts of the ferns, I soon discovered that I was not making my ascent to the cliffs alone. A gray-haired woman, with basket on her arm, overtook me. She seemed to be gathering the bluebells along the ledges. We began to converse, and when we came to some ripe strawberries, we ate in a social way the fruits we found by the path. She told me she was gathering bluebells to decorate the chancel of the church, as it was Children’s Day. On the brow of Gregor Rocks I asked my companion if the legend were true, of which Hawthorne writes, in 1838, during his stay in the valley at North Adams: “A mad girl leaped from the top of a tremendous precipice in Pownal, hundreds of feet high, and, if the tale be true, being buoyed up by her clothes, came safely to the bottom.”[47] She told me the name of the girl who had made the leap. She was a half-witted creature who, descending the cliffs at twilight with a package of wool rolls, thought to save time by throwing her burden ahead of her and leaping from the rocks. Her homespun garments caught and held her in the cedars below, until the villagers heard her screams and rescued her. The rocks are called “Weeping Rocks”—for what reason it is not quite clear, unless through some exaggeration of this story. I collected some perfect ferns, and told my companion their names. She glowed with interest, and told me she had never been to these cliffs since she was a child, until now. She said if she had her life to live again, she would have devoted more time to exploring these rugged hills and vales. Soon our baskets were filled, and with a warm handclasp we parted. I proceeded up Wash-Tub Brook, and secured some fresh plants of the Walking Fern in Hemlock Glen; then I returned to my horse. I was laden with rare treasures from the roadsides before I reached Mount Œta, late in the afternoon. Many of the present names of ferns, lichens, and mosses originated with the ancients. Dioscorides knew and designated two kinds of fern. They were thought to put forth no seed in those days, since they produced no flowers—except as Dodoens in 1578 wrote: “We shall take for seede the blacke spots growing on the backside of the leaves, the which some do gather thinking to worke wonders, but to say the truth, it is nothing else but trumperie and superstition.”[48] The Osmunda, Polypody, Oak-Fern, Hart’s-Tongue, Spleenwort, Asplenium, Venus-Hair and Maiden-Hair, as well as the delicate _Ruta-Muraria_—the Wall-Rue found on Gregor Rocks—were described clearly by the earliest herbalists. These records are full of errors and confusion, since the natural affinity of these species was not then known.