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How beautiful and homelike it was! plushy moss for mattresses decked with red corner berries, noble spruce standing guard about us and spreading kindly protecting arms. A few ferns, aspidiums, polypodiums, with dewberry vines, coptis, pyrola, leafless huckleberry bushes, and ledum grow beneath the trees.
The polypetalous genera Pyrola, Ledum, and Monotropa among the sympetalous heaths, are a remarkable instance of this. The whole evolution of the monocotyledons from the lowest orders of dicotyledons implies the seeming loss of cambial growth and many other qualities. Degressive evolution is not so common by far, and is not so easy to recognize, but no doubt it occurs very frequently.
Here invisible creatures scurried away from a fairy ring whose flagging is of round pyrola leaves, lighted by ghostly white candelabras of the waxy blooms, field mice, very likely, or black beetles, or elves dancing in the moonlight about their queen. How am I to know which?
The lower are mostly alder bushes and the topmost a lavish profusion of flowering plants, chiefly cassiope, vaccinium, pyrola, erigeron, gentiana, campanula, anemone, larkspur, and columbine, with a few grasses and ferns. Of these cassiope is at once the commonest and the most beautiful and influential.
The young man did not relish allusions to that folly of his father's, and was silent. 'Oh, Bob, what a pretty islet! exclaimed Linda, as they passed a rock crested with a few trees, and almost carpeted by the brilliant red foliage of the pyrola, or winter green. 'The bushes make quite a crimson wreath round the yellow poplars.
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.
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.
If he could persuade her to a boat-ride with him on the lake, Sunday evening, the week was complete. He even learned to know the more shy and delicate forest-blossoms that she preferred, and would come in from a day's guiding with a tiny bunch of belated twin-flowers, or a few purple-fringed orchids, or a handful of nodding stalks of the fragrant pyrola, for her.
Sometimes the pyrola simulates it and cracks the gloss on its leaves with a wan wintergreen smile at the success of the deception. But after a little the eye learns to discriminate in winter greens and to know the outline of the arbutus leaf and its grouping from that of the others. Then success in the hunt should come rapidly.
The family of the heath, cranberry, pyrola, Andromeda, and mountain-laurel how do these blossoms welcome their insect friends? This group is particularly distinguished by the unusual exception in the form of its anthers, which open by pores at their tips, instead of the ordinary side fissures. Seen thus in their detached condition, how incomprehensible and grotesque do they appear!
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