Children in the country districts are the first nature students in spring. In May and June the woods and fields become veritable classrooms in which Nature alone presides as instructor. A dense oak and pine forest formerly sheltered the vale near the schoolhouse, where the children seldom dared to wander without their teacher. The wood was dark and full of the twilight shades of the virgin forest trees of our New England hills. In May, many seasons ago, the Purple-Flowered Clematis (_Atragene Americana_) grew abundant in the heart of this rocky wood, covering, in one instance, a bush six feet high with its graceful vine. This plant is rare from Maine to Minnesota. It ranges northward to Hudson Bay, and southward to Virginia, often ascending great heights. It is reported in the Catskills at an altitude of three thousand feet. There are but three species of this genus found natively in the North Temperate Zone, one being reported for the Rocky Mountain region, the other farther to the northwest coast of America. The common Virgin’s-Bower (_Clematis Virginiana_) grows also in rocky places, covering roadside walls and bordering swamps and river banks in July and August. Later in the autumn, this species is very attractive. The seed-pods burst and produce a light, feathery down—little wings to aid the seeds in their flight, like those of the dandelion and milkweed. The seed-capsules of the Purple-Flowered Clematis also produce tails like the plumes of a feather. Several species of _Clematis_ were known to the ancients in Christ’s day. The name originated with Dioscorides, and was used to designate all climbing vines. He knew three kinds under the generic name of _Aristolochia_, named in honor of Aristotle. The “branched vine” with “deepe violet floures,” was called _Aristolochia clematites_. Peter Bellon of ye olden time remarks that this plant grew in the mountains of Ida in Crete, or Candie. Carolus Clusius reported it as growing among the bushes and briars about the city of Hispalis, or Civill, in Spain, before the sixteenth century. I visited Oak Hill Cemetery on May 29th,—a very good place to observe the early flowers of the woods about the valley. The country folk come here with their laurels for Decoration Day, as Milton came to his “Lycidas,” “to empurple all the ground with vernal flowers.”[42] Here may be seen the pink azalea, the marsh marigolds—those golden-cups of _Caltha_,—violets, and painted trilliums amid the bunches of pink and golden moccasin-flowers, brought here in abundance by the school children. On June 5th I sought the swamps of Etchowog. I followed down through the Glen of Comus, in search of the great colony of Pink Moccasin-Flowers. I found them in full bud,—two hundred in number, as formerly. As I entered the hollow, I found in the middle of the path a Small Round-Leaved Orchis (_Habenaria Hookeriana_).