One of the beautiful swallow-tail butterflies lays its eggs on laurel leaves, that the larvae may feed on them later; yet the foliage often proves deadly to more highly organized creatures. Most cattle know enough to let it alone; nevertheless some fall victims to it every year. Even the intelligent grouse, hard pressed with hunger when deep snow covers much of their chosen food are sometimes found dead and their crops distended by these leaves. How far more unkind than the bristly armored thistle's is the laurel's method of protecting itself against destruction! Even the ant, intent on pilfering sweets secreted for bees, it ruthlessly glues to death against its sticky stems and calices. According to Dr. Barton the Indians drink a decoction of kalmia leaves when they wish to commit suicide. As laurel wood is very hard and solid, weighing forty-four pounds to the cubic foot, it is in great demand for various purposes, one of them indicated in the plant's popular name of Spoon-wood. SHEEP-LAUREL, LAMB-KILL, WICKY, CALF-KILL, SHEEP-POISON NARROW-LEAVED LAUREL (K. angustifolia), and so on through a list of folk names testifying chiefly to the plant's wickedness in the pasture, may be especially deadly food for cattle, but it certainly is a feast to the eyes. However much we may admire the small, deep crimson-pink flowers that we find in June and July in moist fields or swampy ground or on the hillsides, few of us will agree with Thoreau, who claimed that it is "handsomer than the mountain laurel." The low shrub may be only six inches high, or it may attain three feet. The narrow evergreen leaves, pale on the underside, have a tendency to form groups of threes, standing upright when newly put forth, but bent downward with the weight of age. A peculiarity of the plant is that clusters of leaves usually terminate the woody stem, for the flowers grow in whorls or in clusters at the side of it below. The PALE or SWAMP LAUREL (K. glauca), found in cool bogs from Newfoundland to New Jersey and Michigan, and westward to the Pacific Coast, coats the under side of its mostly upright leaves with a smooth whitish bloom like the cabbage's. It is a straggling little bush, even lower than the lamb-kill, and an earlier bloomer, putting forth its loose, niggardly clusters of deep rose or lilac-colored flowers in June. TRAILING ARBUTUS; MAYFLOWER; GROUND LAUREL (Epigaea repens) Heath family