"Within the woods Tufts of ground laurel, creeping underneath The leaves of the last summer, send their sweets Upon the chilly air, and by the oak, The squirrel cups, a graceful company Hide in their bells a soft aerial blue." There is little use trying to coax this shyest of sylvan flowers into our gardens where other members of its family, rhododendrons, laurels, and azaleas make themselves delightfully at home. It is wild as a hawk, an untamable creature that slowly pines to death when brought into contact with civilization. Greedy street venders, who ruthlessly tear up the plant by the yard, and others without even the excuse of eking out a paltry income by its sale, have already exterminated it within a wide radius of our Eastern cities. How curious that the majority of people show their appreciation of a flower's beauty only by selfishly, ignorantly picking every specimen they can find! In many localities the arbutus sets no fruit, for it is still undergoing evolutionary changes looking toward the perfecting of an elaborate system to insure cross-fertilization. Already it has attained to perfume, nectar, and color to attract quantities of insects, chiefly flies and small female bees but in some flowers the anthers produce no pollen for them to carry, while others are filled with grains, yet all the stigmas in the neighboring clusters may be defective. The styles and the filaments are of several different lengths, showing a tendency toward trimorphism, perhaps, like the wonderful purple loosestrife; but at present the flower pursues a most wasteful method of distributing pollen, and in different sections of the country acts so differently that its phases are impossible to describe except to the advanced student. They may, however, be best summarized in the words of Professor Asa Gray: "The flowers are of two kinds, each with two modifications; the two main kinds characterized by the nature and perfection of the stigma, along with more or less abortion of the stamens; their modifications by the length of the style." When our English cousins speak of the arbutus, they have in mind a very different species from ours. Theirs is the late flowering strawberry-tree, an evergreen shrub with clustering white blossoms and beautiful rough, red berries. Indeed, the name arbutus is derived from the Celtic word Arboise, meaning rough fruit. LARGE or AMERICAN CRANBERRY (Oxycoccus macrocarpus; Vaccinium macrocarpon of Gray) Huckleberry family