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There, growing in prodigal luxuriance, was the beneficent pitcher-plant, whose large curled-up leaf, shaped like a teacup, not only holds a lasting quantity of rain-water, but mixes therewith its own palatable and natural juices. With his knife he severed two of the leaves, swearing emphatically the while on account of his damaged finger, and hastened to Iris with the precious beverage.

But dead insects of all kinds, and their decomposing remains, crowd the cavity and saturate the liquid therein contained, enticed, it is said, by a peculiar odor, as well as by the sweet lure which is at some stages so abundant as to drip from the tips of the overhanging appendage. The principal observations upon this pitcher-plant in its native habitat have been made by Mrs.

He seemed to be absurdly contented, so different was his tone in discussing a necessarily painful topic to the attitude he adopted during the attack on the pitcher-plant. She was puzzled, but ventured a further step. "Was she very bad to you, Mr. Jenks?" He stopped and laughed actually roared at the suggestion. "Bad to me!" he repeated. "I had nothing to do with her.

"I carried my tin of water to the pitcher-plant, and was listening to the greedy roots gurgling away for dear life, when suddenly four men sprang out from among the trees and seized my arms before I could reach my revolver." "Thank Heaven you failed." "You think that if I had fired at them they would have retaliated. Yes, especially if I had hit the chief.

It was not the trees and lianas only that were beautiful in these sunny openings, but the ferns, mosses, orchids, and selaginellas, with the crimson-tipped dracaena, and the crimson-veined caladium, and the great red nepenthe with purple blotches on its nearly diaphanous pitchers, and another pitcher-plant of an epiphytal habit, with pea-green pitchers scrambling to a great height over the branches of the smaller trees.

It is here that the Cull, which has run for miles under willow and alder, through deep pastures golden with marsh marigolds or scented with meadow-sweet, past cuckoo-flower and pitcher-plant and iris and nodding bulrush, forsakes better traditions, and becomes a common town-sluice before it deepens at the wharves, and meets the sandy churn of the tideway.

The loveliness of the way was enchanting the roads running straight as an arrow through glorious forest lands of pine, beech, maple, and oak, in the full glory of spring, and the perspective before and behind making a long narrowing green bower of meeting branches; the whole of the borders of the road covered with lovely flowers May-wings, a butterfly-like milkwort, pitcher-plant, convolvulus; new insects danced in the shade golden orioles, blue birds, the great American robin, the field officer, with his orange epaulettes, glanced before them.

What had I been bathing in? Again I saw the fleeing mother, again I heard the howl, again I saw the limping beast. But what matter whence it flowed? was not the water sweet? Was it not very water the pitcher-plant secreted from its heart, and stored for the weary traveller? Water came from heaven: what mattered the well where it gathered, or the spring whence it burst?

In the swamp I saw a great many of the Nepenthes distillatoria, or pitcher-plant; they were not exactly of the same description I have seen on the Pellew Islands, and other places; nearly all of them wanted the graceful turn in the stem, for which those elegant plants are so justly celebrated.

In the margin of the pond we found the pitcher-plant growing, and here and there in the sand the closed gentian lifted up its blue head. In traversing the shores of this wild, desolate lake, I was conscious of a slight thrill of expectation, as if some secret of Nature might here be revealed, or some rare and unheard-of game disturbed.