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A plain brown carpet suits it best, with a modest figure of green preferably of evergreen woven into it; a tracery of partridge-berry vine, or, it may be, of club moss, with here and there a tuft of pipsissewa and pyrola. Its mood is sombre, its taste severe.
The Pyrola, named by the Indians Pipsissewa, and regarded by them as a specific for consumption, suspends its pale purple flowers in beautiful umbels, as if to invite the feeble invalid to accept its proffered remedies. Variety, indeed, may be found in these deep shades; but it exists without that profusion which in more favored situations often benumbs our susceptibility to the charms of Nature.
The effect was magical, a bit of its haunt following the fern indoors. Next day I gathered in the hemlock woods a basket of the waxy, spotted-leaved pipsissewa, together with spikes and garlands of club moss. I had thought these perfect when steadied by bog moss in a flat, cut-glass dish, but in the birch stump they were entirely at home.
"Sassafras, that makes tea for skin disease; Ginseng, that's good to sell; Bloodroot for the blood in springtime; Goldthread, that cures sore mouths; Pipsissewa for chills and fever; White-man's Foot, that springs up wherever a White-man treads; Indian cup, that grows where an Indian dies; Dandelion roots for coffee; Catnip tea for a cold; Lavender tea for drinking at meals; Injun Tobacco to mix with boughten tobacco; Hemlock bark to dye pink; Goldthread to dye yellow, and Butternut rinds for greenish."
Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas table.
"Thayer's Goldthread fur cankermouth, an' Pipsissewa that cures fayver an' rheumatiz, too. It always grows where folks gits them disayses. Luk at the flower just blotched red an' white loike fayver blotches an' Spearmint, that saves ye if ya pizen yerself with Spaszum-root, an' shure it grows right next it in the woods!
In like manner one learns where to look for arbutus, for pipsissewa, for the early orchis; they have their particular haunts, and their surroundings are nearly always the same. The yellow pond-lily is found in every sluggish stream and pond, but NYMPHÆA ODORATA requires a nicer adjustment of conditions, and consequently is more restricted in its range.
It was hot summer weather, but he could not be kept warm. After several hours a reaction set in and Corney was in a high fever. The family knew well now that he had the dreaded chills and fever of the backwoods. Margat went out and gathered a lapful of pipsissewa to make tea, of which Corney was encouraged to drink copiously. But in spite of all their herbs and nursing the young man got worse.
He observed among the wild plants that she had gathered the mottled leaves and waxy blossoms of the pipsissewa and its cousin the shinleaf. "You have been a long way to get some of those," he said: "that pipsissewa grows in hemlock woods, and the nearest are several miles from here." "I don't know their names. I found them in a wood where I used to walk sometimes with my brother.
"It's the sap risin'. Time was when I couldn't keep me feet still nor me head cool when the earthworms began to crawl out in the dew of the mornin'. 'Tis a bit of tea will do ye good, made from pipsissewa and gentian bark at the druggist's." "Back up!" said Mr. McQuirk, impatiently. "There's no spring in sight. There's snow yet on the shed in Donovan's backyard.
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