Only a delightfully imaginative optimist like Linnaeus could feel the enthusiasm he expended on this dwarf shrub, with its little, white, heath-like flowers, which most of us consider rather insignificant, if the truth be told. But then the blossoms he found in Lapland must have been much pinker than any seen in American swamps, since they reminded him of "a fine female complexion." "This plant is always fixed on some little turfy hillock in the midst of the swamps," he wrote, "just as Andromeda herself was chained to a rock in the sea, which bathed her feet as the fresh water does the roots of this plant.... As the distressed virgin cast down her blushing face through excessive affliction, so does this rosy-colored flower hang its head, growing paler and paler till it withers away." Under the old go-as-you-please method of applying scientific names, most of this shrub's relatives shared with it the name of the fair maid whom Perseus rescued from the dragons. The beautiful, low-growing STAGGERBUSH (Pieris Mariana) has its small, cylindric, five-parted, white or pink-tinted flowers clustered at intervals along one side of the upright, nearly leafless, smooth, dark-dotted branches of the preceding year. When the glossy oval leaves, black dotted beneath, are freshly put forth in early summer - for the shrub is not strictly an evergreen, however late the old leaves may cling - it is said that stupid sheep and calves, which find them irresistibly attractive, stagger about from their poisonous effect just as they do after feeding on this shrub's relative the Lambkill (q.v.). In sandy soil from southern New England to Florida, rarely far inland, one finds the staggerbush in bloom from May to July. On the dry plains of Long Island, where it is common indeed, it appears a not unworthy relative of the FETTERBUSH (Pieris fioribunda), that exquisite little evergreen with quantities of small white urns drooping along its twigs, which nurserymen acquire from the mountains of our Southern States to adorn garden shrubbery at home and abroad. Mr. William Robinson, in his delightful book, "The English Flower Garden" (a book, by the way, that Rudyard Kipling reads as the Puritan read his Bible), counts this fetterbush among the "indispensables."