The gravelly banks of the railroad, on which I go dry-shod through the swamp, are covered with a forest of chicory; a thrifty immigrant, tall, coarse, scraggy, awkward, homely, anything you will, but a great brightener of our American waysides on sunny midsummer forenoons. It attracts much notice, and presumably gives much pleasure, to judge by the number of persons who ask me its name. May the town fathers spare it! The bees and the goldfinches will thank them, if nobody else. Here I am interested to see that a goodly number of the plants--but not more than one in fifty, perhaps--bear full crops of pure white flowers; a rarity to me, though I am well used to pink ones. Gray’s Manual by the by, a Cambridge book, makes no mention of white flowers, while Britton and Brown’s Illustrated Flora says nothing about a pink variety. In a multitude of books there is safety, or, if not quite that, something less of danger. The pink and the white flowers are reversions to former less highly developed states, I suppose, if certain modern theories are to be trusted. I have read somewhere that the acid of ants turns the blue of chicory blossoms to a bright red, and that European children are accustomed to throw the flowers into ant hills to watch the transformation. Perhaps some young American reader will be moved to try the experiment. The best plants, however, those that I enjoy most for to-day, at all events, are the cat-tails. How they flourish!--“like a tree planted by the rivers of water.” And how straight they grow! They must be among the righteous. We may almost say that they make the swamp. Certainly, when they are gone the swamp will be gone. Both kinds are here, the broad-leaved and the narrow-leaved, equally rank, though _angustifolia_ has perhaps a little the better of the other in point of height. The two can be distinguished at a glance, and afar off, by a difference in color, if by nothing else. “Cat-tails” and “cat-tail flags,” the Manual and the Illustrated Flora call them; but I was brought up to say “cat-o’-nine-tails,” with strong emphasis on the numeral, and am glad to find that more romantic-sounding name recognized by the latest big dictionary. Not that the name has any particular appropriateness; but like my fellows, I have been trained to venerate a dictionary, especially an “unabridged,” as hardly less sacred than the Bible, and am still much relieved whenever my own usage, past or present, happens to be supported by such authority. Rankness is the swamp’s note, we may say. Look at the spatter-dock leaves and the pickerel-weed! The tropics themselves could hardly do better. And what a maze and tangle of vegetation!--as if the earth could produce more than the air could find room for. So much for plenty of water and a wholesome depth of black mud. One thinks of the scriptural phrase about paths that “drop fatness.”