One specimen, snowy white, I have seen, and can tell you where to find another.  You are to go out along the President’s highway, due northward from a certain seaport of Massachusetts.  Take the eastward turn at the little village which lies at the head of its harbor, and so north again by the old Friends’ meeting-house, which looks in brown placidity away toward the distant shipping and the wicked steeple-houses, into the which so many of its lost lambs have been inveigled.  Then be not tempted to strike off down yonder lane, to see the curious old farm-house, relic of Colony times, with its odd stone chimney, its projecting upper story and carved wooden pendants, and its shingles all pierced into decorative hearts and rounds.  Its likeness is not in Barber’s book,—­no, nor its visible form, I believe, (it is many a year since I went that way,) on earth.  It became a constellation long ago,—­being translated to the stars.  Keep on with good heart along the highway ridge, whence you can look down on the solemn, close-set, pine forest, which hides from you the windings of the river, and the beautiful lakelet, where the water-lilies float in the summer.  Go on down the valley, past the old tavern,—­relic of stage-coaching days, the square, three-story, deserted-looking tavern,—­up again a couple of miles or so, till the river has dwindled to a brook and then to a marsh.  Here is the place of our seeking.  For under the shade of one of those huge granite rocks over which the thin soil of ——­ County is sprinkled, and which here and there have shaken off the superincumbent dust in indignation at the presumption of man in attempting to farm them,—­under that rock—­of course I shall not tell you which—­you will find the White Arethusa, if you are born under a lucky star.

A little later, the crimson lady-slipper loves to spring up in pine clearings, around the base of the wood-piles which the cutters have stacked in the winter to season.  To one born by the salt water there is an especial forest delight in the pine woods.  For that best-loved sound of the ceaseless fall of plunging seas upon the beach comes to him there.  Many a time I have walked from Harvard’s leafy shades and cheerful halls out to the quiet of the Botanic Garden for the sake of hearing the wind in the pine tree-tops.  Shut your eyes, and the inward vision sees once more the long line of sandy and shingly beaches, the green curving-up of the surges tipped with dazzling foam,—­sees the motionless and blackened timbers of the wreck on the shore, the white wings dipping and turning along the combing tops of the waves racing in upon the sands,—­sees the dry tufted beach-grass, and the wet, shining, compact slope down which slides swiftly the under-tow.  And what a healthful exhilaration it is to breathe the balm-laden breath of the pine forest, and to tread the elastic slippery-soft carpet of the fallen spiny leaves!  Here is the haunt of the lady-slipper, (cypripedium,) a shy, rare flower, like a little sack delicately veined, with a faint musky scent, and large-flapped leaves shading its flower.