As I went on with my hunting, I learned that not all the members of the orchis family are beautiful. There is the coral root, with tiny dull brownish-purple flowers, which one finds growing in dry woods, often near colonies of the Indian pipe. The green and the ragged-fringed orchids are other disappointing members. Yet, to a confirmed collector, even these poor relations of the family are full of interest. In fact, the second rarest orchid of our American list--the celebrated crane-fly orchid (_Tipularia unifolia_)--has a series of insignificant greenish-purple blossoms which look as much like mosquitoes or flies as anything else, and can be detected only with the greatest difficulty. Yet I am planning to take a journey of several hundred miles this very summer on the off-chance of seeing one of these flowers. Nearly as rare is the strange ram's-head lady's-slipper (_Cypripedium arietinum_), the rarest of all the cypripedia and belonging to the same family as the glorious moccasin flower and queen flower. The lip of the ram's-head consists of a strange greenish pouch with purple streaks, shaped like the head of a ram. There are scores of other odd, often lovely, and usually rare, members of the great orchis family, which can be met with from May to September. There is the beautiful golden whip-poor-will's shoe, in two sizes (_Cypripedium hirsutum_, and _Cypripedium parviflorum_), and those lovely nymphs, rose-purple Arethusa (_Arethusa bulbosa_), and Calypso (_Calypso borealis_), with her purple blossom varied with pink and shading to yellow. One of the fascinations of orchid-hunting is the fact that you may suddenly light upon a strange orchid growing in a place which you have passed for years. Such a happening came to me the day when I first found the rose pogonia (_Pogonia ophioglossoides_). I was following a cow-path through the hard hack pastures which I had traveled perhaps a hundred times before. Suddenly, as I came to the slope of the upper pasture, growing in the wet bank of the deep-cut trail, my eye caught sight of a little flower of the purest rose-pink, the color of the peach-blossom, with a deeply fringed drooping lip, the whole flower springing from a slender stem with oval, grass-like leaves. To me it had a fragrance like almonds, although others have found in it the scent of sweet violets or of fresh raspberries. It is the pogonia family which includes the rarest of all of our orchids, the almost unknown smaller whorled pogonia (_Pogonia affinis_). Few indeed have been the botanists who have seen even a pressed specimen of this strange flower.