Lifting my admiring gaze from the pool with its white panicles and swarming bees I saw further beauty beyond. On firmer ground nestling lovingly against an old chestnut post was a great, glorious spike of habenaria, the purple-fringed orchis. It is not uncommon, the habenaria, in peaty meadows, but no man sees it for the first time in the season without a great glow of delight, and I hastened over to give it nearer greeting. Just as I reached it the butterfly came dancing up, but not to sip the sweets of the wonderful great orchid. Instead he lighted, right under my nose, on the roughest part of the old fence post and began to lick this as he had the pine trunk. [Illustration: There was the swish of wings, the snip-snap of a bird’s beak, and it was all over] I watched him again, hearing subconsciously the voice of a great crested flycatcher over on a nearby tree, crying “Grief,” “Grief.” A moment and the little red tongue which I had noted before seemed to catch on the roughest part of the old fence post, and with a sudden scrape the Basilarchia scraped it off. I looked in amaze, for now I saw what it was. From the honey heart of some flower a little red worm had become attached to the tip of the butterfly’s proboscis, and all this licking of rough surfaces had been merely to get rid of him. Up into the bright sunshine danced my black white admiral. There was the swish of wings, the snip-snip of a bird’s beak, and it was all over. The cry of the great crested flycatcher had been a prophecy indeed, and the white admiral had danced blithely out of existence. But the equatorial haze had more tropical enchantment in store, for the midday sun was suddenly wiped out by an ominous figure. Some one had uncorked that bottle which held the heat genie confined, and he was looming from a black nimbus below into white piles of cumulus at the zenith. His eyes flashed red lightnings and he spoke in thunder tones. Somewhere over yonder I heard the great crested flycatcher crying “Grief,” “Grief,” again. It might be my turn next, and I patted the great orchid good-by and tiptoed through the sphagnum and climbed the hill again. It had been a brief but pleasant trip. A butterfly that found a tongue and a turtle that ate terrapin with a happy smile may belong with the genie in the Arabian Nights, or with Alice in Wonderland, or both. I know that I found them at the fountain head, under the grove of immemorial pines, below the brow of the terminal moraine where sleep the fathers of the hamlet. DOWN STREAM DOWN STREAM