forest at an even six-foot level from the ground. Worked in among the lichens and mosses, quite without design, were the deep-woods flowers--patches of goldthread, beds of foam-flower and delicate wood-sorrel and the brilliant little bunchberry. Wherever the sunlight had a chance to touch the cold, boggy bottom it seemed to set the punk on fire and blaze up into these scarlet berries, stumps and knolls and slopes aflame with them, to burn on through the gloom until they should be smothered by the snow. Twin-flower and partridge-berry were laced in little mats about the bases of the trees; here and there the big red fruit of trillium and the nodding blue berries of clintonia were mixed in a spot of gay color with berries of the twisted stalk, the wild lily-of-the-valley, and the fiery seed-balls of the Indian turnip. These touches of color were like the effect of flowers about a stately, somber room, for this was an ancient and a solemn house of mighty folk. If the little people came to dwell in the shadow of these noble great they must be content with whatever crumbs of sunshine fell from the heaven-spread table over them to the damp and mouldering floor. There were corners so dark that only the coral orchid and the Indian pipe pushed up through the mat of leaves; and other spots, half open to the sky, where the cinnamon fern and the lady fern waved their lovely plumes, and the wood fern, the beech, the oak, and the crested shield ferns grew together, forced thus to share the scanty light dropped to them from the overflowing feast above. But I never saw mushrooms in such marvelous shapes and colors and in such indescribable abundance as here. The deep forest was like a natural cavern for them, its cold, dank twilight feeding their elfin lamps until the whole floor was lighted with their ghostly glow. Clearest and coldest burned the pale-green amanita, and with it, surpassingly beautiful in color and design, the egg-topped muscaria, its baleful taper in a splotched and tinted shade of blended orange yellows, fading softly toward the rim. Besides these, and shorter on their stems, were white and green and purple russulas, and great burning red ones, the size of large poinsettia blooms; and groups of brown boletus, scattered golden chanterelles, puff-balls, exquisite coral clusters, and, strangest of them all, like handfuls of frosted fog, the snowy medusa. These last I gathered for my lunch, together with some puff-balls and a few campestris, whose spores, I suppose, may have been brought into the woods with the horses when this tract was lumbered years ago. But I had little appetite for mushrooms. It was the sight of them, dimly luminous in the rain, that held me, their squat lamps burning with a spectral light which filled the dusky spaces of the forest full of goblin gloom.