A short walk toward West Rock, New Haven, showed me how far advanced the season really was. Here were crowds of children playing in fields covered with violets and bluets, and farther down in the damp meadows were long, serpentine lines of gold, where the Marsh Marigolds (_Caltha palustris_), known commonly as Cowslips, were already fading. On the edges of the swamp, the Marsh Buttercups of the Crowfoot Family (_Ranunculaceæ_), were lifting their shallow yellow cups to catch the sunshine. We wandered on through a pretty, wild bit of young woodland until we reached the border of a murmuring stream, creeping onward through the vale and meadow, touching the blossoming orchards here and there, and freshening the sweet white violets on its brink. North Adams, Massachusetts, was to be my next station. This city is about two hundred miles from New York, among the Hoosac Highlands. I almost expected to see reluctant snowdrifts still lingering in the fence corners and shaded pine glens of this part of “Beautiful Berkshire,” and I half hoped to find a few late clusters of the Trailing Arbutus (_Epigæa repens_) creeping through the cold, mossy ravines. Upon my arrival in North Adams, I looked through the bogs under the brow of Hoosac Mountain near Aurora’s Lake, and I could perceive scarcely any difference in the progress of flowers or foliage here from that of the region from which I had just departed. Dogwood, apple trees, violets, anemones and wake-robins were in blossom, while in the deeper bogland I found one lone, pale Pink Moccasin-Flower (_Cypripedium acaule_). American White Hellebore, so commonly known as Indian Poke or Itch Weed (_Veratrum viride_), had already sent out a luxuriant growth of green leaves, which for a moment deceived me—as it had done many times before—by its resemblance to the foliage of the Showy Lady’s Slipper. The leaves of both these plants are plicate, and have ever been confused even by the earliest herbalists. Unrolling a spike of leaves one day, I found I had actually disturbed the buds of the queen of the Lady’s Slippers instead of the Hellebore, although they proved to be blasted. No doubt some warm day had started them prematurely, frost and cold rains later proving their ruin. Here on a sheltered damp hillside, I found my first clusters of the season of the Pink Azalea (_Azalea nudiflora_), which is commonly known hereabout as Swamp-Apple, and which is very similar to _Rhodora Canadensis_. These species belong to the Heath Family, one of the largest among the flora of Hoosac Valley. The beautiful pink flowers of the Great Rhododendron, which measure from one to two inches in diameter, render it the most charming species of this group. It is cultivated extensively, but grows in its natural wild state, in this region, only along the margins of ponds near Montpelier and Wells River, in Vermont.