When Freckles started for the trail next morning, the shining new specimen-box flashed on his back.  The black “chicken,” a mere speck in the blue, caught the gleam of it.  The folded net hung beside the boy’s hatchet, and the bird book was in the box.  He walked the line and tested each section scrupulously, watching every foot of the trail, for he was determined not to slight his work; but if ever a boy “made haste slowly” in a hurry, it was Freckles that morning.  When at last he reached the space he had cleared and planted around his case, his heart swelled with the pride of possessing even so much that he could call his own, while his quick eyes feasted on the beauty of it.

He had made a large room with the door of the case set even with one side of it.  On three sides, fine big bushes of wild rose climbed to the lower branches of the trees.  Part of his walls were mallow, part alder, thorn, willow, and dogwood.  Below there filled in a solid mass of pale pink sheep-laurel, and yellow St. John’s wort, while the amber threads of the dodder interlaced everywhere.  At one side the swamp came close, here cattails grew in profusion.  In front of them he had planted a row of water-hyacinths without disturbing in the least the state of their azure bloom, and where the ground arose higher for his floor, a row of foxfire, that soon would be open.

To the left he had discovered a queer natural arrangement of the trees, that grew to giant size and were set in a gradually narrowing space so that a long, open vista stretched away until lost in the dim recesses of the swamp.  A little trimming of underbush, rolling of dead logs, levelling of floor and carpeting with moss, made it easy to understand why Freckles had named this the “cathedral”; yet he never had been taught that “the groves were God’s first temples.”

On either side of the trees that constituted the first arch of this dim vista of the swamp he planted ferns that grew waist-high thus early in the season, and so skilfully the work had been done that not a frond drooped because of the change.  Opposite, he cleared a space and made a flower bed.  He filled one end with every delicate, lacy vine and fern he could transplant successfully.  The body of the bed was a riot of color.  Here he set growing dainty blue-eyed-Marys and blue-eyed grass side by side.  He planted harebells; violets, blue, white, and yellow; wild geranium, cardinal-flower, columbine, pink snake’s mouth, buttercups, painted trilliums, and orchis.  Here were blood-root, moccasin-flower, hepatica, pitcher-plant, Jack-in-the-pulpit, and every other flower of the Limberlost that was in bloom or bore a bud presaging a flower.  Every day saw the addition of new specimens.  The place would have driven a botanist wild with envy.