The same is true of the clumps of _Osmunda regalis_ that grew here and there along the pond shore. Rightly named “regalis” they stood in royal beauty four or five feet tall and leaning over the water’s edge admired the bipinnate grace of their fronds, while the tallest stalks bore aloft the clusters of spore cases that looked like long spikes of plumed flowers. No wonder the plant which is common to England also drew the notice of Wordsworth, who refers to it as-- “that tall fern, So stately, of the queen Osmunda named. Plant lovelier in its own retired abode On Grassmere beach than naiad by the side Of Grecian brook.” Flowering fern it is rightly named, too, but it had flowered and gone, and I found of all its regal beauty but a single stalk with brown spore-cases held rigidly aloft among a tangle of brown leaves and bog grass. Then I looked for the sensitive fern. This with its slender, creeping rootstock sending up single fronds is less woody than any of the others and I began to suspect that it would have disappeared utterly. So the sterile fronds had. There was no trace of them in spots that in summer were a perfect tangle. But this was not true of the fertile stalks. Here and there these, like the one of the royal fern, stood erect and bore their close-lipped spore cases, seal-brown and stiff, high above dead leaves and other decay of fragile annuals. All this made a disheartening fern chase, and I turned to the steep side of the hemlock-shaded northern hill, sure of one hardy variety that would have no use for invisibility, however chill the north wind might blow. No smile of direct sunlight ever touches this hill. It is set so steep that only the mid-summer midday sun overtops its slant and this the dense hemlock foliage shuts out. No woodland grasses grow in its dense shadow and only here and there the partridge berry and the pyrola creep down a little from the top of the ridge where some sunlight slips in. Yet in its densest part the Christmas fern revels and throws up fronds that seem to catch some of their dark beauty from the deep green twilight of the place. In the spring these stand in varying degrees of erectness, but autumn seems to bring a change in the cellular structure of the lower part of the stipe and weaken it so that the fronds fall flat upon the earth. They lose none of their firm texture or color, however, and be the temperature ever so low or the snow ever so deep they undergo no further change till the next spring fronds are well under way. Sometimes even in mid-summer you may find the fronds of the year before, somewhat fungi-encumbered and darkened with age, but still green.