Wherever it be found, the moccasin flower will always hold me by its sheer beauty. Yet to my memory none of them can approach the loveliness of that cloistered colony which I first found in the pine wood so many years ago. Year after year I would visit them. Then came a time when for five years I was not able to travel to their home. When, at last, I made my pilgrimage to where they grew, there was no cathedral of mighty green arches roofed by a shimmering June sky; there were no aisles of softly singing trees; and there were no rows of sweet faces looking up at me and waiting for my coming; only heaps of sawdust and hideous masses of lopped branches showed where a steam sawmill had cut its deadly way. Underneath the fallen dying boughs which had once waved above the world, companioned only by sky and sun and the winds of heaven, I found one last starveling blossom left of all her lovely company. Protected no longer by the sheltering boughs, she was bleached nearly white by the sun, and her stem crept crookedly along the ground underneath the mass of brush and litter which had once been a carpet of gold. Never since that day have I visited the place where my friends wait for me no more. It was another orchid which, for eleven years, on the last day of every June, made me travel two hundred miles due north. From an old farmhouse on the edge of the Berkshires I would start out in the dawn-dusk on the first day of every July. The night-hawks would still be twanging above me as I followed, before sunrise, a dim silent road over the hills all sweet with the scent of wild-grape and the drugged perfume of chestnut tassels. At last I would reach a barway sunken in masses of sweet-fern and shaded by thickets of alder and witch-hazel. There a long-forgotten wood-road led to my Land of Heart's Desire. Parting the branches, I would step into the hush of the sleeping wood, pushing my way through masses of glossy, dark-green Christmas ferns and clumps of feathery, tossing maidenhair. Black-throated blue warblers sang above, and that ventriloquist, the oven bird, would call from apparently a long way off, "Teacher, teacher, teacher," ending with a tremendous "TEACH!" right under my feet.