There were no such last-year relics in the flat-woods, so far as I remember, but spring blossoms were beginning to make their appearance there by the middle of February, particularly along the railroad,—­violets in abundance (Viola cucullata), dwarf orange-colored dandelions (Krigia), the Judas-tree, or redbud, St. Peter’s-wort, blackberry, the yellow star-flower (Hypoxis juncea), and butterworts.  I recall, too, in a swampy spot, a fine fresh tuft of the golden club, with its gorgeous yellow spadix,—­a plant that I had never seen in bloom before, although I had once admired a Cape Cod “hollow” full of the rank tropical leaves.  St. Peter’s-wort, a low shrub, thrives everywhere in the pine barrens, and, without being especially attractive, its rather sparse yellow flowers—­not unlike the St. John’s-wort—­do something to enliven the general waste.  The butterworts are beauties, and true children of the spring.  I picked my first ones, which by chance were of the smaller purple species (Pinguicula pumila), on my way down from the woods, on a moist bank.  At that moment a white man came up the road.  “What do you call this flower?” said I.  “Valentine’s flower,” he answered at once.  “Ah,” said I, “because it is in bloom on St. Valentine’s Day, I suppose?” “No, sir,” he said.  “Do you speak Spanish?” I had to shake my head.  “Because I could explain it better in Spanish,” he continued, as if by way of apology; but he went on in perfectly good English:  “If you put one of them under your pillow, and think of some one you would like very much to see,—­some one who has been dead a long time,—­you will be likely to dream of him.  It is a very pretty flower,” he added.  And so it is; hardly prettier, however, to my thinking, than the blossoms of the early creeping blackberry (Rubus trivialis).  With them I fairly fell in love:  true white roses, I called them, each with its central ring of dark purplish stamens; as beautiful as the cloudberry, which once, ten years before, I had found, on the summit of Mount Clinton, in New Hampshire, and refused to believe a Rubus, though Dr. Gray’s key led me to that genus again and again.  There is something in a name, say what you will.

Some weeks later, and a little farther south,—­in the flat-woods behind New Smyrna,—­I saw other flowers, but never anything of that tropical exuberance at which the average Northern tourist expects to find himself staring.  Boggy places were full of blue iris (the common Iris versicolor of New England, but of ranker growth), and here and there a pool was yellow with bladderwort.  I was taken also with the larger and taller (yellow) butterwort, which I used never to see as I went through the woods in the morning, but was sure to find standing in the tall dry grass along the border of the sandy road, here one and there one, on my return at noon.  In similar places grew a “yellow daisy” (Leptopoda), a single big head, of a deep color,