The Adder’s-Mouth Pogonia has been formerly confused with our native species of _Arethusa bulbosa_, and for some time was known as Adder’s-Tongue Arethusa. Thomas Wentworth Higginson writes: “On peat-meadows the Adder’s-Tongue Arethusa (now called _Pogonia_) flowers profusely, with a faint, delicious perfume,—and its more elegant cousin, the _Calopogon_, (now called _Limodorum_) by its side.”[25] Yet Thoreau had a different impression of the rose-pink Pogonia’s fragrance, and says in his notes in _Summer_, on June 21, 1852: “The adder’s-tongue arethusa smells exactly like a snake. How singular that in Nature, too, beauty and offensiveness should be thus combined!”[26] On July 7, 1852, he again mentions these species of orchids: “The very handsome ‘pink-purple’ flowers of the _Calopogon pulchellus_ (now known as _Limodorum tuberosum_) enrich the grass all around the edge of Hubbard’s blueberry swamp, and are now in their prime. The _Arethusa bulbosa_, ‘crystalline purple,’ _Pogonia ophioglossoides_, snake-mouthed (tongued) arethusa, ‘pale-purple,’ and the _Calopogon pulchellus_, grass-pink, ‘pink-purple,’ make one family in my mind (next to the purple orchis, or with it), being flowers _par excellence_, all flower, naked flowers, and difficult, at least the Calopogons, to preserve. But they are flowers, excepting the first, at least, without a name. _Pogonia!_ _Calopogon!!_ They would blush still deeper if they knew what names man had given them.”[27] The Pogonia seems to bloom slightly in advance of Limodorum, and is a delicate, waxen-pink flower. It raises its single terminal blossom about six inches high amid the tall grasses of the swampy meadow. It is not so beautiful as its comrade species, the Grass-Pink; but to me it is sweetly fragrant, and since it is an orchid, it is precious, although small and somewhat unsightly in its suggestiveness. [Illustration: =The Thompson Brook, East Pownal, Vermont.= “_They left their home of Summer ease_ _Beneath the lowland’s sheltering trees,_ _To seek, by ways unknown to all,_ _The promise of the waterfall._” WHITTIER.] There are two leaves: one, oblong and sessile, appears in the middle of the stem; and another smaller, bract-like leaf is found at the base of the seed-capsule, bearing the nodding blossom with its alert bearded petals. The roots are little clusters of fibrous threads, loosely attached in the moss-grown mounds of the primeval forest stumps,—which are slowly decaying below the soil in these aged swamps.