At the west end of the cow-path I came suddenly upon one tall, Purple-Fringed Orchis. This was my first good fortune in finding this beautiful species, although I have since found many. I stood long in wonderment and silent adoration before this fragrant beauty of the weird and lonely bogland, rearing its strange fringed petals high above the common swamp grasses. Searching about to the north and south, I found a colony of six more spikes, which assured me that I would be justified in taking the first plant I had found; and placing it with the utmost care in my crowded vasculum, I then proceeded mountainward. On the very brow of the hill I wound around to the left, entering the wood-road leading to the Notch Valley. A beautiful cold spring gushes out in the heart of this wood, under the hill at the right, near the Cascade path. I freshened my flowers here, and hurried on to the famous foot-bridge over Notch Brook, plunging on down through the hemlock wood to get a hurried view of the Cascade below. As I returned homeward over the heated fields, I found the atmosphere very exhausting; and the flowers, although protected in my botanizing can, were wilted. Measuring the broad expanse that intervened between me and the hill of Aurora’s Lake, the journey seemed interminable. The distance was finally covered, however, and both my fatigue and the fact that I was late for tea were forgotten in the ecstasy of having found that first Purple-Fringed Orchis. This spike grew, and every bud expanded, until within a few days it became beautiful indeed, giving forth its delicate fragrance, and proving itself the prize I had esteemed it, as I lifted it from the dark earth of the bogland of northern Berkshire. IX Over the Huckleberry Plains Thou shalt gaze, at once, Here on white villages, and tilth, and herds, And swarming roads, and there on solitudes That only hear the torrent and the wind. BRYANT, _Monument Mountain_. On July 17th, two days before departing from the Hoosac Valley, I was guided to a group of swamps lying along the summit of the Domelet. The brow of this mountain is yearly devastated by forest fires, after which it appears quite barren, save for the trees and bushes protected in the swamps. A few tall trees, branchless and blackened, stand as sentinels about the huckleberry plains. But soon the young and tender growth of oak, chestnut, and birch springs up on these rocky ridges, while the clearings everywhere are carpeted with low blueberry bushes. Between the Domelet and the Dome lies a valley known as “Rocky Hollow.” The ledges of rock, walling it about, bear deep erosions in evidence of the Ice Age, when a gigantic glacier once crowned and rounded the Dome. The formation of these deep vales lying at its base is due to the moraines which flowed down from the ice-capped heights.