The right of way leads over a level, firm trunk of a fallen tree, one that has been so long down that only a mossy ridge indicates its existence, to a sphagnum mound which tops a stump as old as the causeway. A swamp maple grows at this stump as a back for my seat in this reception room of the jewel-weeds. I think it is the sway of the slender maple that puts me in rhythm with the mood of the place and gives me eyes to see things as they are, for after a little the rough swamp snarl of straggling growth unravels itself, and things stand revealed. There is the rough bedstraw. Somebody who saw it first shall burn for calling such a sweet little plant such a mischancy name. I protest that the bedstraw is worthy a better. To be sure it is rough. The prickles that line the edges of its stems all point back, and while they do not wound they hold you tenaciously when you touch them. Thus the plant clings to other woodier stems and climbs vicariously. But why bedstraw? I trust that none of the people who came out of the ark and set about naming things as they followed had to make bedding of these rough stems. With the whorls of slim green leaves that climb with the slender stalks the plants make lace and a green mist all about, underfoot in the marsh, lace that drapes tall plants to which it clings, a green mist out of which shine constellations of tiny star blooms. Picking these constellations to pieces one might place a hundred of the tiny, four-pointed stars on a copper cent and never overlap the petals, yet they shine above the green as Orion and Cassiopaea do over the frost fog of a winter night, they are so vividly white. I never see this at first. It is only after the tranquillity of the place has shrunk my unwieldy bulk to the patient potency of the tiny herbs themselves that I have the sight. It is admirable, this potent patience of these wee things that are born in bogs yet in their own world grow stars the memory of which lasts as long in the consciousness of man as does that of the Pleiades. If you pluck them you will see by turning them over that these constellations are as whitely bright to small eyes that look from below, from the ooze of the bog or the roots of marsh grass, as they are to our great eyes that look from above. Of an early September morning in the clear stillness I feel that they loom like varnished planets of the sky in their own lowly heaven of coruscating dew that coats all things with a milky way of white fire drops, a dew that has risen all night from the warmth below and, chilled by the cold blue void of space, has hesitated on every leaf and twig, frightened into immobility; infinitesimal drops as shining white and as close together as the stars in a winter night sky. At dawn all the bog world is crusted with this dew.